


given one more chance

by angel_deux



Series: we should kind of forget about season 8 [3]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Everything follows canon except Jaime and Theon are alive, F/M, Hand of the Queen Jaime, Kingsguard Brienne, Mutual Pining, also there's a lot of talking in this fic, alternating pov, because fuck season 8 that's why, irritating the shit out of their respective besties sansa and tyrion, sad salty exes jaime and brienne pine annoyingly while miles and miles apart, they don't do much action, to be clear i fuckin hate the kingsguard ending, which is why i wrote this thing where it happens and it sucks, who write letters about how much they hATE them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-10-10 03:18:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 28,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20521076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux
Summary: "Stay with me," Brienne begs him, standing in Winterfell's courtyard.Jaime can't refuse. He stays with her.Brienne's the one who leaves.





	1. tell me now where was my fault

**Author's Note:**

> so here we are again with another unnecessarily angsty Jaime/Brienne alternate-season-8 tale that's also highkey Jaime + Sansa friendship fic. This time with a little dash of Sansa/Theon and a healthy helping of Brienne + Tyrion annoying the shit out of each other. 
> 
> the title + chapter titles are all going to be from mumford and sons, because that's all I listened to while writing this.

“Stay with me,” she begs, standing in Winterfell’s courtyard, and even though he was sure when he rose in the night and dressed by the weak light of the fire that he could not be persuaded from this path by anything, he feels his resolve weakening with her hands on his face and her eyes wet with tears.

_Stay with me_, she says, and she makes it into a choice. It didn’t feel like one, earlier. It felt like something he _had_ to do. He couldn’t sit back while his sister was killed for crimes that he helped her commit. Whether or not Cersei deserved her fate, Jaime couldn’t endure knowing that he had done nothing to help her. But Brienne looks at him the way she does, and Jaime feels…

Selfish.

He _wants_ to be selfish. He wants to take what Brienne is so freely offering him: freedom, escape, _love_. He wants to go back into that cold, ruined castle, and he wants to crawl under their furs, and he wants to kiss every inch of Brienne’s skin until they fall asleep holding each other. He wants to stay here with her and let the past go. It’s the only way forward for him that doesn’t feel like ten steps back, and yet he is torn so painfully between grasping at what he wants and letting it go.

It was easy to tell himself that she would be better off without him when she was asleep and he was sneaking out. It’s harder now that she’s here and looking at him. She looks so broken-hearted for him and for herself for loving him, and he can’t _bear_ seeing his love for her reflected in her eyes. If he goes, it will be the hardest choice he’s ever made, and he knows it will also likely be one of his last. Before the battle, Bran had looked at him with this finality in his expression, and ever since then, Jaime has just _known_. He’s not long for this world. The odds of him making it out of Kings Landing alive are so very low.

There is a choice to make in that frozen courtyard, and there are two paths, and Jaime swallows a bitter sob, and he nods, and he closes his eyes, and he kisses her. He can taste her tears on her lips, and that triggers his own. Brienne is crying too, kissing him desperately, pulling him closer, folding him into her arms. She has never felt so much bigger than him, and he has never felt so small, and with every step he takes back inside the keep, his heart constricts tighter with the knowledge that he can’t take this back. This is the choice he has made, and now he must live with the consequences.

* * *

The meeting with the stonemason is running late, and Jaime is irritated, but a year of dealing with these people has made him better able to pretend at patience. They move aside so that a wagon can squeeze past them, laden with bricks. The stonemason halts the driver and gives the load a slow look over, counting and inspecting. Jaime rolls his eyes to the heavens.

He catches sight of the Queen of the North standing on the walkway above, one of her eyebrows raised in question. She’s amused, he knows, though she doesn’t show it in any other way. Jaime briefly mimes hanging himself. She jerks her head back towards her quarters, and he nods.

Finding an excuse to get away from the ponderous mason is easy, because Jaime’s halfway across the courtyard by the time the man realizes he’s gone, and he strides back into Winterfell with a gusty sigh of relief that unfortunately attracts the attention of a farmer he’s too familiar with after a year of listening to these people bitch and moan about low crop yields and too little gold to buy mules or whatever it is they want from his queen. He waves the man off rudely, glad Sansa isn’t around to see it.

He’s gotten better, but it’s only been a year. Forty-odd years of being an ass don’t disappear after just one.

When he finally reaches Sansa’s quarters, he sees that Alys is guarding her today. Sansa’s Queensguard is a patchwork thing, because there are so few fighting northerners left, and Sansa’s trust is a difficult thing to earn. Jaime’s mouth twists into a bitter smile.

“Lady Commander,” he says.

Alys bows slightly. She’s a dutiful girl, at least. She takes it seriously, and he’s seen the way she fights. She fights more like Arya Stark than the bruising strength of Brienne, but it’s a good style, and he knows her slightness means she is better able to surprise assailants who think she won’t be a threat.

“Jaime,” she says, briefly almost stumbling into calling him _Lord Hand_, which she knows very well he hates. He grins at her and pushes through into Sansa’s room.

* * *

Sansa has a letter laid out in front of her at her desk. She also has already poured him a glass of wine, so he can’t help but feel a bit of anxiety. He should have known when two weeks went by without major emergencies that something bad was on its way.

“What is it?” he asks. Sansa frowns in his direction.

“It’s a letter from your brother,” she says. “Sit down.”

He does, only a little irritated by the tone. They’re friends now, he’s pretty sure, but his early tenure as Hand of the Queen was punctuated with moments of sharpness from Sansa, as if she thought he was a pet who needed to be reminded not to shit on the furniture. And though they’ve come a long way since then, she can still be prickly. A consequence of being a young woman queen in charge of the infamously difficult northerners. Most of her subjects love her, and even more of them defer to her, but he understands why she’s resistant to showing any weakness. And sometimes, when she’s frustrated or frightened, he’s fairly certain that she exerts her power because she needs to be reminded that she _has_ it, especially over _him: _a man who was so closely related to most of her earliest tormenters.

“Has something happened?” he asks.

Sansa shakes her head slightly, though her expression is considering.

“Why did you stay?” she asks. Jaime unavoidably must think of Brienne. Her hands on his face in the courtyard. He clears his throat.

“What do you mean?” he manages.

“When I asked you to be my Hand, you could have refused. I assumed you would. But you accepted, and you stayed. Why?”

“Where else was I supposed to go?”

“Kings Landing.”

“I told you. I had no desire to be back there.”

“Yes, and you stayed with me, even though your brother serves mine. Even though Brienne serves him too.”

She’s looking at him in an intent sort of way that he hates.

“I stayed,” he admits quietly.

“And Brienne left.”

He sets his jaw to keep from grinding his teeth. That old wound. He swallows a gulp of wine to give himself time to think of a response.

He had stayed for _her_. He had allowed his sister to die without trying to save her. He traveled back to Kings Landing when it was all done, and he stood by and lent his voice to support Bran Stark – or whatever creature resides in Bran Stark’s body – on the throne.

And Brienne came to him, the night after the coronation, and she said, “Bran has offered me the position of Lord Commander,” and he could tell from the apology in her voice that it was an offer she would not refuse.

“Then I wish you good fortune, Ser Brienne,” he had replied, and then he had kissed her, and they had both been crying a bit as they fucked, and in the morning he took his things and moved them out of her room.

“I’m sorry,” she had said, strangled, after he watched her take her vows.

“Don’t be sorry,” he had replied. He could not offer her more than that. The truth was that even if he didn’t love her, he would not be happy for her. He couldn’t be happy about her consigning herself to the Kingsguard, but it was apparently what she wanted, and she did deserve _that_, at the very least. “I hope you’re happy, Brienne. I mean that.”

“It is an honor,” she said helplessly, and he nodded, and he smiled to reassure her that he didn’t feel any bitterness for her choice, although of course that was a lie.

And when Sansa asked him only hours later if he would consider being her Hand, he had accepted. Better to be in Winterfell, he thought, than to be surrounded by Brienne. Always near her but never close enough to touch. Always tempted but never daring to try to make her abandon her vows. No, he would not dishonor her, and so he would remove himself from the daily reminder that he wasn’t _enough _for her, and he would attempt to do something good in the world. Try and make up for his family’s many failings by helping a Stark rebuild.

“I stayed because of her,” he says to Sansa once he has worked out what to say. “When she asked me to. And she chose to leave. Staying here with you seemed an easier thing to do than remaining in Kings Landing and actually _dealing _with it.”

“I told her I would be pleased if she remained in Kings Landing to guard Bran. I didn’t realize she would choose that to the exclusion of being with you. And I thought you would stay with her anyway.”

“Yes, well. You Starks. Always so bloody noble. Can you imagine being stuck here without me? You’d be reliant on Alys for company, and she can hardly look at you. Fawning old men and servants who trip on their feet every time you look their way. Quite a happy ending for you. The lonely northern queen.”

“That meeting with the stonemason must have gone worse than it looked. You’re only usually this miserably mean in the early morning.”

“You’re the one who brought up Brienne. What does the letter say?”

“As it happens, Tyrion is concerned that Brienne is unhappy in her role. The Small Council think her too rigid, and they talk over her ideas. Bran apparently has little need of a _truly_ competent Kingsguard, since he can deflect most threats easily enough by warning of them when they’re still being planned. Even Podrick is bored, Tyrion writes.”

“I’ve seen that lad spend hours in contemplation of his oatmeal,” Jaime mutters, making himself comfortable by sprawling out in his chair, feeling the fight going out of him once again. “Seems I made the right choice.”

“I fear I didn’t,” Sansa admits. Her voice is quiet and small in a way it so seldom gets. Almost childlike. “I thought she would like it there.”

“_I _didn’t.”

“Why didn’t you ask her to stay, then? If you knew? She would have listened.”

“That’s exactly why I didn’t ask her. She would have listened, and she would have hated me and herself for listening.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Of course I do. People would have thought her weak for giving up such an honor just to follow the whims of the man she was fucking for a time. To say nothing of the fact that it was _me_.”

“Do they think you weak for choosing to stay with Brienne instead of riding back to your sister?”

“Probably. But it’s different for me. You know that.”

They’ve had enough talks about this – long, wine-drunk contemplations about the nature of power. He would talk about how Cersei craved it, and how it changed her, and how he never fully understood. And Sansa, surprising him with the depth of her own understanding, colored as it was with her hatred for Cersei. Hatred and understanding could go hand-in-hand, it seemed. When you start without power, and when you know what happens to you when you lose it, it’s easy to drive yourself mad trying to grasp at enough of it to make you feel safe again. Jaime has never understood that, because he has never had to. Sansa, Cersei, Brienne. _Daenerys_. They all understood strength in ways he never did. 

“She should have stayed here,” Sansa says. “I should have asked her, if you wouldn’t. I thought she would choose you. I thought she would choose _us_.”

“She didn’t,” Jaime reminds her gently. If this conversation could just _end_, that would be great.

“I imagine you think it was a noble thing to do,” Sansa says, sarcasm dripping from her tone. “Refusing to ask her to stay.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“If you knew she’d be unhappy…”

“I didn’t _know_. I suspected. I _knew_ that it wasn’t my choice to make.”

“It wasn’t _her_ choice to make when you thought the right thing to do was to ride off and die with your sister.”

He looks sharply at her, and she looks back. Unrepentant. He frowns.

“That wasn’t her choice. It was my choice. She just reminded me that it _was_ one.”

“Why didn’t you do the same for her, then?”

“I didn’t have to. Not with Brienne. She knew how I felt about her.”

“Did she?”

“Of course she did! What do you think we were _doing_ all those nights we spent together after she saved me?”

“The same things you were doing in the nights _before_ she saved you, I imagine. You lay together the first time the night of the feast. I’m not an idiot. I remember seeing your smug face the next day, and she couldn’t look me in the eye for _hours_ without smiling to herself. I assume you knew she cared for you then, and you still needed her to remind you.”

“What is this? Why are you doing this?” Jaime asks. It’s unlike Sansa to be so pointedly cruel. 

“Why didn’t you ask her to stay?”

“I told you.”

“Were you afraid she would say no? Or were you afraid she’d say yes?”

He glares at her, because he feels very _old_, suddenly. Too old to be talked to like this by a girl he has come to see as almost a daughter.

“Why are you doing this?” he asks again.

“It was both, wasn’t it?”

“If you want me to bring up your own mislaid affections…”

“I have mislaid my affections plenty of times. You’ve mislaid them once. On your sister. They weren’t mislaid on Brienne.”

She speaks defensively, sharply, and it takes some of the fire out of him.

“Of course not,” he says. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Brienne isn’t happy. You aren’t happy. I miss her. I miss Arya. I miss Jon, and I miss Theon.”

Jaime cuts a smile at her: his sharpest one.

“Maybe you should have asked him to stay,” he says.

Sansa levels him a deeply unimpressed look.

“Perhaps I will,” she says. “But this is about Brienne.”

“Brienne makes her own choices. It wasn’t on me to ask her to change them.”

“And we’re back to fear.”

“Oh, of course I’m bloody afraid. I couldn’t ask her.”

“Why not?”

He can tell from the straight set to Sansa’s shoulders that this is a conversation they will be having for the rest of his life unless he answers her now, and so he swallows back that Lannister impulse to be sarcastic and shitty about it, and he forces himself to say the words.

“If I had asked her, and she stayed…she would have loathed me for it. For a moment, maybe, or for years. Who can say? I didn’t want that. Even if it meant letting her go, keeping her regard turned out to be more important to me.”

A look of understanding flashes on Sansa’s face.

“You hated her. When she asked you to stay.”

“When I heard Cersei was dead. For a _moment_. A single moment. But maybe for her, it would have been longer. I don’t know. The thought of her coming to resent me for talking her out of something she might have wanted…I couldn’t risk it.”

“She isn’t happy, Jaime. She could just as easily blame you for that.”

“She wouldn’t. She knew the choice she was making.”

“But she would blame you for asking her to stay?”

“She would blame herself for giving in, but she would resent me for asking her to give something up just because I wanted her.”

“I don’t think she would,” Sansa says, but he knows he has struck a nerve, because she sounds more subdued, more thoughtful when she says it. Thinking of Theon again, probably.

“Maybe she wouldn’t,” Jaime agrees, but he knows he’s right.

* * *

In truth, he has spent far too long thinking about all the ways he could have asked Brienne to stay with him. From the day they left Kings Landing, he has wondered if he made the right choice in deciding not to beg her or try to convince her. It had been an impulsive, reactive decision at first, like most of them. But it had solidified as The Right Choice as time went by. The Only Choice, even.

Brienne had not asked him for his thoughts. She wasn’t exactly shy with him at that point, after the months they spent at Winterfell. If she wanted his input, she would have asked. And it wasn’t as if she said that she was _considering_ taking the position. She had looked at him, and he had known. Her choice was made. She loved him. He has never doubted that. But she loved honor and duty too. She loved those things _more_, as it turned out.

Jaime is well used to being chosen second to something greater than himself. Cersei chose power every chance she had. She never would have run away with him. And if she had…if, in a moment of weakness he was able to convince her, she would have hated him for it. Her lost power would have consumed her. She would have hated herself for the weakness and she would have hated him for making her weak. He would not make that mistake with Brienne.

But that was the selfishness. Those were the reasons that were about him. There was also a sense that he might be wrong. _What if she _does_ wish to be a Kingsguard above all else_? In truth, he never thought it was that important to her. She just wanted to do _good_, he thought. And she knew enough about his own feelings on the Kingsguard and the way it had soiled him that he assumed she would reject the position if it was offered. Sansa’s Queensguard, maybe, since that was a new order that was tied so closely to the lady she already loved to serve. But the bloody Kingsguard? Why would she ever want _that_? Perhaps he hadn’t understood her as well as he thought he did, if it was such a dream for her to serve whatever king ascended. Growing old and withering away for a succession of rulers who probably wouldn’t be worth her sword. Jaime was proud of it once, but he can’t feel that same pride for the position anymore. Not after everything.

He thinks of her that night as he tries to fall asleep in the chambers they once shared. He wonders if she is truly so unhappy, or if it is an attempt at kindness from his brother. As if Tyrion thinks Jaime wants to hear that his former lady is miserable without him.

He hopes Tyrion is wrong. He hopes that Brienne finds solace in her precious duty. He hopes that he is just a bitter idiot who is the only one in this arrangement who dreams longingly of when the other asked him with tears in her eyes to stay.


	2. I want to learn to love in kind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, it's me again: angel_deux's anxiety. I do need to point out that I don't exactly see this as a "realistic" scenario!!! I'm with y'all. I think this is a bananas thing to write! I absolutely think that Brienne would have stayed in Winterfell with Jaime. This is more of a meta exploration of what I have perceived to be a popular opinion from some GA folks I know (i.e. my Bad Take Coworker) that Brienne wanted to be Kingsguard/would choose Kingsguard over Jaime bc she's a "Strong Independent Woman" etc etc. I sort of mixed it with my own perception of Brienne, and a lot more is discussed/explained about why she felt the need to take the posting later, but the important thing is that this is an AU I in no way agree with! I don't want anyone judging my taste for this lmao

_Are you happy? _

Tyrion’s question lingers within Brienne for days after he asks. It keeps reminding her of the last person who asked her that: Jaime, three days after she followed him out of their chambers in a robe and begged him like a maiden to stay when it was clear he preferred to ride off and die.

Those three days had been spent in states alternating between a stunning relief and a quiet despair. She would wake with her arm tight around him, holding him close in her sleep, and she would remember that he was with her and still alive, and she would nearly want to weep with gladness. But then she would catch sight of him throughout the day, wandering Winterfell’s halls like a half-dead almost-ghost, and he would look so _lost_, and she would remember.

Love, she thought, was too powerful an emotion. It was frankly shocking that anything else was ever the cause of anything.

She knew that Jaime loved her. That wasn’t in question. But there are loves of different kinds. There was the love Brienne had for her father. The infatuation she had for Renly. The adoration she felt for Lady Catelyn. The odd, maternal stirrings she felt for Lady Sansa and for sweet, good-natured Podrick. There was the love she felt for Jaime. They were different from each other. They _felt_ different. They gave her different things, and they demanded different things from her in return.

For Jaime, there was the love he had for Brienne, and there was the love he had for Cersei, and Brienne knew that the love he had for his sister was a force that no one else could hope to match. They had been together all their lives. They had been lovers for nearly as long. How could she think to compete with that? How could she even _want _to?

She understood that when Jaime chose to stay in Winterfell, he was choosing to live as much as he was choosing to live with _her_. He was giving up his sister as lost, and he was taking what Brienne offered instead. But his instinct, his muscle memory, had been to fling himself into a danger he clearly did not want to go into. He was willing to give his life just to die alongside Cersei.

Brienne had been heartbroken. Brienne had been _terrified_. What kind of emotion was love to make someone do something so horrible?

She tried to imagine it. Leaving Winterfell behind in the middle of the night and riding just to be beside Jaime when he died. Could she have ever done that? Abandoned her duty just because her love for a man was so strong? She didn’t know. She still doesn’t. It terrifies her. The power of something like that…

“Are you happy?”

He had asked her in their quarters, with his shoulders hunched miserably under a bulky fur cloak that did nothing to hide his nervousness. He looked at her with his eyes narrowed, like he was angry with her, though she heard the sad edge of his voice and knew that he wasn’t. She worried about how piercing the look was. She worried he would see her wariness and think that she lied when she answered, “yes, I’m happy.”

“Are you?” he demanded again. She had been gentle with him in those three days after his choice to live. Too gentle, perhaps. Afraid it was a temporary reprieve, or perhaps afraid to make him change his mind. She snapped at him to try and put them back on the old familiar footing.

“Well I won’t be if you keep bothering me about it,” she had said, and the bite of her voice brought a small smile to his face at last.

“If you’d tell me the truth the first time, I wouldn’t have to ask a second,” he said.

“Take off that ridiculous cloak,” she responded. “It isn’t that cold in here. Get in bed.”

He had laughed at her. The tension left his shoulders. He cast the cloak aside, stripped off his clothes. He crawled under the furs naked, and she took her time in following him. His question made her nervous. _Are you happy_? She didn’t want him to see it. She _was _happy. She was. Was he?

When she was fully bare, her skin prickled with cold and with awareness of his eyes on her as she threw another log on the fire. He laughed at her again, groaning, wanting her closer. She could feel it.

“Hurry up,” he said, and he flopped onto his back as she approached, so she knew what he wanted. She climbed onto the bed, and she straddled him.

“Let me show you how happy I am,” she said, and his hand and his stump both held her lightly, on the outside of each thigh.

“Show me,” he replied. His tone was even enough, but it was also pleading.

Those had been heady, desperate days. Before Bran. Before the end. Those days in Winterfell and then on the road to Kings Landing and even in those first few days in what remained of the Red Keep. Quiet and heartsick as they were about the destruction wrought by the dragon queen and the news of the death of his sister and the fact that his brother was a prisoner, they were still desperate for one another, as if they knew the time was short.

The time had _always_ seemed short to Brienne. Since the first moment he touched her, she was waiting for it to end. He would realize he didn’t care for her the way he thought. He would leave her. He would reveal himself to be joking all along. _Something_. She didn’t know what. But something. She grew more sure of it after he almost went. She had been enough to lure him back to the world of the living, but it wouldn’t last. She waited for him to leave again.

And then, after all that worry, she was the one who left.

Maybe it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way. So sure that he would leave her that she took the first chance she saw to be the one to leave instead. But even now, even after time has given her clarity, she can’t boil it down to any one thing. Fear. Honor. Duty. Obligation. There were so many reasons to leave, and only her emotions made her want to stay, and she had been convinced that that wasn’t enough.

Or maybe she thought of Jaime, leaving the safety and warmth of her arms on an aborted impulse to die with his sister, and she ripped the chance of that kind of horrible love right out of her heart.

Or maybe not.

“Are you happy?” Tyrion asked, and Brienne had been so startled by the question. He didn’t often look like his brother, but he’d looked like Jaime then. That same sad look in his eyes. Searching and yearning for something that she couldn’t give him.

“I’m doing my duty,” she had said in response, and one corner of Tyrion’s mouth had lifted in response.

“That’s as I thought,” he had said.

* * *

Days later, and she finds herself still thinking of it at odd moments. Arguing with Bronn over some stupid nonsense involving a longstanding battle between an inn and a brothel. Trying to help Davos sort out a multi-language dispute between three merchant captains down by the docks. Standing motionless behind the king as Bran looks off into nothing and goes flying into some birds or whatever it is that he does when his eyes go white like that. The work isn’t satisfying. It isn’t _entertaining. _But it isn’t terrible or humiliating, either. It’s just work.

_I’m doing my duty. _

_But are you happy?_

Lying awake one night, she decides that the answer is no. No, if she wants to look at it directly. Confront it instead of just dressing it up in pretty words about honor and legacy and duty. No, she isn’t happy. But does that matter? She always knew she wasn’t made for happiness. Many people are far less happy than she is. She has attained an honor that no woman before her has enjoyed. She has been in love twice in her life, and one time it was actually returned, for however brief a time. That’s more happiness than she ever thought she would have. If she has regrets, they are no worse than anyone else’s. If she wishes she had done things differently, at least she knows that she isn’t the only one, and at least she is still in a good service. She’s _needed_.

* * *

She has a meeting with Tyrion the following day. Meetings with Tyrion are always long, involved things. He tries to lighten the conversation with jokes she doesn’t find particularly funny, and she steadfastly tries to keep them as on topic as she can while he attempts to duck out of her grasp and run screaming down the hall like an unruly toddler during a bath. Metaphorically.

“I can never understand you, Brienne,” he says today, huffing out a laugh as he consigns another piece of correspondence to the pile that have been addressed and discussed. “There are so few opportunities to make these things a little fun, and yet you allow all of them to pass us by. Insist on it, in fact.”

“Perhaps _you_ have nothing more pressing to attend to, but I have other duties,” Brienne says. Tyrion laughs.

“I’m the Hand of the King, Brienne. You don’t need to lie to me.”

“_Lie_ to you?”

“I know your entire schedule. We are a country at peace, with an omniscient king. You do realize we’re both only here for appearances sake, yes? Keep the rabble thinking Bran is something of a normal king despite all the oddness they don’t understand. We’re about as useful as nipples on a breastplate.”

“You know, there are other useless things. I don’t know why you always use that one,” she grumbles, and Tyrion laughs.

“Because it’s singularly useless, and that’s exactly what we are. You aren’t happy. I’m not happy. At least I know I’ve earned this…punishment. You? What have you done that warrants such a cold and dutiful existence?”

She thinks often of the way Jaime sagged when Sansa had, in a moment of rare tenderness for the Lannister heir, informed him privately that his sister had been confirmed killed. She thinks of the empty way he had gazed at the fire that night, and the way Brienne hesitated to touch him, fearing that he might regret listening to her when she begged him to stay. She thinks of the way he looked at her when she told him that Bran asked her to be Lord Commander. Resigned. Defeated. Briefly angry, like a candle guttering out against the wind. One last flash of defiance before he had accepted it. One last desperate, needing fuck before he had affixed a pretty, pleasant mask on his face and only addressed her with a distant kind of kindness thereafter. Is this unhappiness her punishment for that? No, she wouldn’t go so far. She knows he understood her choice, even if it hurt him. Still, it feels like a punishment sometimes.

“I don’t know,” she manages to say. “Not every punishment has to be earned. That isn’t how the world works. Do you think all of the people your queen burned deserved it? Do you think people like Renly and Robb Stark deserved to die the way they did for the crime of not wanting your horrible nephew to rule them?”

“No,” Tyrion admits. “I suppose it’s comforting to believe that things have a purpose. Some kind of order in the chaos. But they don’t, do they? Still, I wish I could find a way to help you.”

“I don’t need help.”

“Help you be happy. I know it’s what my brother would want.”

He doesn’t often speak of Jaime to her. He usually knows better than that. She hates to have his presence here, a ghost in the room.

“I didn’t choose this path because I thought it would make me happy,” she says. “I chose it because it was the right thing to do.”

“The right thing for you? Or the right thing for the realm? Because as we have discussed, the realm doesn’t need you.”

Anger, then. Coursing through her. She stands, grounding herself by clutching at the lion’s head on her sword.

“My choices have been made, Lord Tyrion. I would thank you not to mention them again.”


	3. and I'll believe in grace and choice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this entire chapter is jaime and sansa chatting about boys so it is my favorite one

Sansa pines the way she does everything else: quietly, steadfastly, with a blank face and a refusal to show her longing openly. Jaime is just very good at recognizing it. When you’ve spent the whole of your life in love and unsatisfied with the results, you become skilled at seeing the same thing in others.

Besides which, it isn’t as if Jaime spends much time with anyone but her, and he’s always been observant.

His chosen queen is dutiful. She’s a _good_ queen. She’s loved by all because of her fairness and because of her gentle commitment to doing right by her subjects. She never allows her emotions to distract her from doing the right thing, and she listens to petitions with a patience that is frankly inhuman. He hears people talk about her. Good things, mostly, but people wonder about the icy mask she always seems to wear. They say the capacity to care has been frozen out of her. They say her experiences have made her hard-hearted. Stone-hearted.

Jaime doesn’t understand how they can’t see what he sees. Sansa is quiet with her affections, it’s true, but she _does_ have them. She doesn’t laugh aloud, but she smiles and ducks her head when he tells a joke she likes. She remembers the names of her servants and her subjects, and she always asks after their families. There are three orphaned children, two little lords and one little lady, who she has taken into the castle after their houses were otherwise wiped out in the fighting. Their lands have been given over to stewards to hold for them until they’re grown, and he doesn’t think anyone who has seen her with the young ones could think her unfeeling.

But they don’t see. Sansa doesn’t let them. Her mask is protection. It is as much a part of her reign as the crown she wears or the ornate chair she sits upon in the Great Hall. She rules fairly and she rules well, and that’s all her people really need from her, but Jaime sometimes wishes that they would see her the same way he does.

* * *

“I received a letter from Yara Greyjoy,” he says. It’s the first thing he’s said since she entered his office to talk about food stores. He knows it catches her off guard. He keeps his face blank only through an amount of effort that’s usually beyond him. Sansa’s eyes dart to him immediately, but they otherwise show no indication of her thoughts.

“Oh?” she asks. “What about?”

He laughs at her finally, at the falseness of her casual tone. She glances at the door to make sure it’s shut, and then she glares and flings a decorative pillow from her chair in his direction.

Sometimes moments like this, moments in which she is almost a child again, make him think of Myrcella and the feel of her in his arms just before she began to choke. The beauty of that feeling, the acceptance when she called him _Father_.

“I’m your queen,” Sansa reminds him loftily as he continues to grin at her. “Stop mocking me.”

It wasn’t always like this between them. The morning after Brienne begged him to stay, Sansa seemed to sense that he had been halfway to gone already. Maybe she saw the red rims of his eyes and saw the way they matched the red rims of Brienne’s. She glared at him, and she snapped at him later in the hallway, and he could not put aside the way she had goaded him about Cersei’s forthcoming execution. Easy enough to remind himself of all that Sansa had suffered at the hands of Cersei and Tywin and Joffrey. But harder to look it in the face when she looked so pleased with his family’s fall and so disgusted with everything he did. So distrustful. _I am not my family_, he wanted to say, but that was counter to everything he had ever lived and done, and even though he had made the conscious choice to leave the last of his family behind and stay in Winterfell to save himself, that didn’t mean it was so easy to disclaim them.

But he stayed, and he worked, and he offered Sansa advice when she needed it, and when she received word of the nightmare in Kings Landing, she left off the end of the letter until they were in private, and she told him about his sister’s death with a gentleness that would never be mistaken for regret, but which could perhaps be sympathy.

Maybe she saw, finally, his devotion to Brienne. Maybe she understood that he had had a choice between staying with her or going back to Kings Landing and that he had chosen correctly. She began to ask him for advice when she needed it. She began to include him in her planning sessions. On the road to Kings Landing, she more often than not waved Jaime up to ride beside her, like she felt safer with Brienne on one side and Jaime on the other.

In Kings Landing, after Bran asked Brienne to become Lord Commander and Brienne accepted, Sansa found him. She did not tell him that she was sorry. She did not rage about Brienne’s choice. She looked stricken, but only a little. When she asked him to be her Hand, he thought she was joking.

“Almost everyone I love and trust will be here, or away,” Sansa had said. She glossed over the future absence of her family and Theon Greyjoy as if they were minor hurts, but he already knew her better than that. “Which I suppose leaves you.” It made him laugh, at least. Bitter and quiet, but still a laugh. “I thought it was worth asking. If you turn it down, I will of course understand. I know you…”

“I accept,” he had said, surprising them both.

It was a year of learning and patience and, usually, extreme annoyance on one or both of their sides, but real affection has formed. He never quite forgets that she’s the queen, and she never quite forgets that he’s a Lannister, but most of the barriers between them have fallen neatly down, turning instead into bridges.

It’s why he feels comfortable saying, “I wouldn’t mock you if you weren’t behaving in a manner that’s so tempting to mock.”

She gapes at him, and he can see the reluctant smile forming behind the false incredulity. Much as she is loath to admit it aloud, she misses her family. Her sister, for some reason sailing away from the people she spent years trying to get back to. Her brother, gone long before he decided to be king. Her cousin, doing whatever it is he thinks he needs to be doing beyond the wall. She probably misses Robb, too. Jaime remembers the first King in the North as a very serious lad, but he has no doubt he was a mischievous boy. Sansa must have grown up loved, surrounded by laughter. All gone now, except for what little entertainment her one-handed fool companion can bring her. Luckily for them both he’s as obnoxious as he’s ever been.

“_I’m_ behaving in a way that’s tempting to mock?” she asks. “You’re the one sighing mournfully around my castle like a lovelorn idiot in a song.”

“I do not sigh mournfully.”

“Swooning onto all my couches. Staring off into the distance on all my battlements.” Jaime laughs, and Sansa emits a small snort of amusement before schooling her face back into some kind of chastisement. “Mooning about, losing concentration in all our meetings.”

“Now I know you aren’t serious. I’m very good at pretending to concentrate in all our meetings.”

“That’s when you do the absolute _most_ of your mournful sighing.”

“Your point is well taken, your grace. But if I’m ridiculous, you’re absurd. There’s nothing keeping you from asking him to come back.”

Sansa makes a face at him, annoyed with his sudden swerve back into serious conversation.

“Theon is with his family. That’s where he wants to be.”

“He came back to Winterfell for you,” Jaime reminds her. They’ve talked about it, a few times. Sansa always dips her toes cautiously into the conversation but then goes skittish and backs away again. She much prefers to talk about Jaime’s heartbreak, and Jaime is often glad to indulge her. He’s not nearly as bad as Sansa said, but he _does_ get a bit dramatic about it sometimes, and Sansa enjoys the distraction it offers. Her own longing is so much more muted.

“I can’t marry him,” she says.

It’s the first time she’s said something of the sort, and Jaime sits up straighter as he realizes that they’re actually going to talk about it. He hasn’t even told her what the bloody letter _says_, yet.

“Why not?” he asks. “Because of what he did? I’ll grant you the northern lords might not like it, but they’ve put up with me as Hand. They clearly like you enough to forgive the occasional terrible choice.”

“He can’t give me children,” Sansa says. She’s clutching her dress in her hands very tightly. He knows little of what happened to her here under Ramsey Bolton’s reign, but he knows there are rooms she avoids, and he remembers Rhaella’s nightly screams, and he knows what it means when she clings to her skirts like that. “Ramsey…after what Ramsey did…Theon can’t give me children.”

“Then don’t have children,” he says. A gentle reminder. “Don’t do anything you don’t want.”

“I need to have children. Who will follow me if I don’t?”

“They’re asking the same questions about Bran, and I’m sure there will be plenty of answers. You can adopt one of your orphan children officially.”

“The Stark name is important, but so is the Stark blood,” Sansa says, sighing. “To the northern lords, at least.”

“Yes, and you know how much I care for the opinions of the northern lords.”

“You may not care for them, but they need to care for me and my reign, otherwise we won’t be able to keep the peace. Maybe I’ll get lucky and Jon will fall in love with some Wildling woman who’s actually worthy of him, and he’ll provide me an heir or two to legitimize, but I think he’s bent on punishing himself.”

“And Arya…”

“And Arya,” Sansa agrees with a wry grin.

“Well, so get married to someone else. Make an arrangement. That doesn’t mean you can’t be with Theon.”

“Of course _you_ would suggest that,” Sansa sighs.

“I don’t know who it was who decided that we’re supposed to pretend that our noble arrangements are made with love in mind. It isn’t as if anyone doesn’t know that an alliance is an alliance.”

“My parents loved each other,” Sansa snaps.

“Yes, and your parents were very lucky. My sister loathed Robert Baratheon, and that sentiment is much more likely. You’re the queen. You have options. Take a consort from a lesser house. Limit his power, make him take your name. Lay with him, if you truly need a child, but keep your heart your own. Enter into the agreement with the full consent of everyone involved. It doesn’t have to be a terrible thing.”

“To violate marriage vows?”

“Is it more in keeping with the vows if you lie to yourself about your marriage? Do your gods not see and understand that you don’t love the man you’re marrying? Surely they do. Do you think the gods have smiled down at both of your previous marriages? The vows were spoken. The septon said all the pretty words. Do you think the gods were pleased?” Sansa glares at him, not angry enough to stop him speaking yet, but he recognizes that she’s reaching the end of her willingness to continue in this vein. “Don’t dismiss what you want as hopeless without at least considering other options. I think maybe your cousin isn’t the only one punishing himself.”

“You speak so eloquently when it’s not your own heart we speak of,” Sansa says quietly. “But I’m sure you know it isn’t as easy a decision when it’s your own life.”

“No. It isn’t. But Theon…Sansa, you should know. Yara wrote to tell me that Theon left the Iron Islands. He says, apparently, that he has done all he could to help Yara put things to rights. He wants to serve you. Here. In Winterfell. His true home, she writes.”

Sansa has gone very pale. She releases the tight hold that she had on her dress. She reaches out her hand for the letter, and he passes it over.

“He told her he wants to join my Queensguard, if I’ll have him,” she says once she’s finished. Her voice is thick with questions, with wondering.

“In my experience…” he starts, mischief in his tone.

“Shut up.”

“I’m only saying: it’s no small thing for a man to swear his life to protect a woman he loves. It seems he knows you cannot marry him. He probably doesn’t realize just how much you love him. He just wants to help you however he can. If you had any doubts…I believe he does love you, your grace.”

“I,” Sansa says. Her fingers tremble as she trails them over the words on the page. “I don’t think I would even know what to do with it.”

“Well, if you want my advice. As your Hand, and as…whatever else I am to you.”

“Much, much older brother?” Sansa suggests, trying to pretend that she isn’t choked up with emotion. “Sort of a wayward uncle figure?”

“One of the very first objects of your mislaid affections,” he argues, pressing his stump against his heart with an earnestness he knows will annoy her.

“I told you that in confidence, and I also told you that I was a very stupid little girl back then, and I thought your hair was _pretty_.”

“And _I _promised I wouldn’t tell anyone that for all your superiority and eyerolls, you were once so shy around me because you found me incredibly dashing and handsome and- oof.” He laughs as Sansa shoves the leg of his chair with her foot under the desk, making it wobble because Jaime is, as always, balanced precariously on only two of the legs. “Sansa, you don’t need to do anything with it. His feelings, your feelings. Whatever they are, you can do or not do whatever you’d like. You’re safe now, whatever you choose to do. You’re the queen, and your subjects love and respect you. No one’s going to force you to make any decisions, and if they try, I’m still quite good with a sword, even with only the wrong hand to swing it in.” Sansa smiles at him a little distantly.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I expect I’ll be looking for a new Hand long before the question of my succession comes into play,” she points out.

“Yes, I’m very old, practically ancient, but the spirit of the offer is the important part. You don’t need to fear the same things you did when you were my sister’s prisoner. You don’t need to fear letting anyone know the contents of your heart. You’re the queen, and if you love a man who can’t give you children, the lords will understand the steps you take to ensure you can love that man _and_ do your duty. I promise you, they will. We’re all weary of war and fighting. Someone choosing to love an improper person is nothing compared to the rest of it. Speak with Theon. Tell him how you feel. Accept him to the Queensguard if that’s what you think you want. Marry him if you think you want to. Don’t marry him if you think of a different solution.”

“You speak as if it’s simple.”

“It isn’t. I know it isn’t. It should be. I would very much like for it to be.”

Sansa holds his gaze for a few moments more, and then she nods.

“Thank you, Jaime,” she says. He nods, and she gets up to head for the door. They never did talk about those food stores. Sansa turns back when she reaches the door, her fingers hesitating on the handle. “If I wrote to my brother. If I asked him to release Brienne, he-”

“Don’t do that,” Jaime says. Sansa hesitates. “She won’t thank either of us for it.”

Sansa nods once, looking bitterly unhappy, and she goes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> listen i didn't write the scene, but the time Sansa admitted she once had a teeny crush on Jaime was followed immediately by jaime being like "what a coincidence, I had a crush on your mom when I was a kid" and Sansa immediately ordered that they never talk about it ever again, but she has since asked him like a thousand questions because she can't stop being mildly horrified and curious about it


	4. better not to breathe than to breathe a lie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a super short one, but I have a lot to do today, so it's appropriate! Don't worry, next chapter picks up in the action and, uh, *checks notes* Jaime...catches a cold. All right so this isn't the most exciting story lmao.

The days when Bran asks to speak with Brienne specifically are always a little nervewracking. He rarely requests conversation at all, preferring to simply bring up vital issues of the kingdom any time one of his small council members happens to be within earshot. Everything is said in the air of a casual observation.

“There is a man in Flea Bottom who has found himself some Wildfire and plans to use it. You should stop him.”

“My sister received a letter from Arya an hour ago. She cried, after.”

“Bronn is trying to get Podrick to join him in a brothel. You should tell Bronn to leave him alone, but it won’t stop him,”

Once, only once: “Ser Jaime misses you”.

He doesn’t say things like that to be cruel, she knows, though sometimes when he hits too close to something, Tyrion will look bitterly injured, or Bronn will go pale. With Brienne, maybe she’s imagining it, but it seems like Bran is a bit kinder. He could say very many worse things than he does, and instead he avoids the subject of Jaime as if it was all imagined. Sometimes she wonders if it’s because it _was_ imagined. Was she right when she thought, in her deepest and most paranoid moments, that Jaime’s regard for her was nowhere close to what hers was for him? Was she right that he never would have been happy with her? Did she make the right choice in joining the Kingsguard after all?

Sometimes, though, she thinks maybe the opposite is true. Maybe Bran knows that her duty is the only thing keeping her here, and maybe he knows that her sense of it grows weaker every time she thinks of Jaime’s smile or the crinkles at the corners of his eyes or the fact that every day she isn’t spending by his side seems like a waste of time she never thought she’d have.

Today, it’s difficult to say. An attendant is just leaving the king’s quarters when she enters the room. The man bows to her and leaves, looking shaken.

“People don’t like to hear inconvenient truths,” Bran says, sounding almost irritated by it. Brienne smiles a little helplessly.

“No,” she says. “I suppose they don’t. You summoned me, your grace? What can I help you with?”

“If you had asked me, I would have changed the rules.”

Brienne frowns at him.

“I’m sorry, your grace. I don’t know what you mean. What rules?”

“The vows. If you had asked me, I would have written new vows for you to swear. I wanted you as my Lord Commander, and you agreed. You would not even let me name you Lady Commander. You wanted every vow exactly the same. Why?”

Brienne knows enough of the piercing way Bran asks her that to be wary. She wonders if Tyrion has put Bran up to this, but she knows it’s far more likely that Bran was somehow listening to her conversation with the Hand, and he knows that it’s a topic that continues to be unsettled. Maybe he requires more of a show of loyalty.

“I wanted the traditional vows because that is the way it’s done,” she answers.

“Things are done a certain way until that way is no longer useful, and then they’re done in new ways,” Bran says. He sounds like a child for a moment, naive and confused by her lack of understanding of something so _simple_. “Progress means changes.”

“I did not require anything to progress.”

“You are the first female member of the Kingsguard. The first female Lord Commander. The first female knight. You have progressed a great many things. Without asking, it is true. You have simply demanded change by your very presence.”

Brienne nods her head in acknowledgement of that fact. She grew up learning that she was never to demand space for herself. That she was to fit herself into the neat boxes that already existed for ladies. That she could not fit had always been a source of shame. She supposes, even now, it’s difficult to admit.

“It has been an honor,” she says. “All of it.”

“Yes, I know it has. You have given yourself to the service of others, and I suppose it is a comfort.”

“It is, your grace.”

“You know I do not need you. You spoke with Tyrion about it.”

Brienne hesitates. It’s not like he’s _asking_ her. She still feels strange admitting it.

“I do know that, your grace,” she says. “If you can find some use for me…”

“I knew it would make Sansa feel better, having you here with me. I told her I did not need you, but she insisted that I needed to be protected. She doesn’t understand, still. She is still trying to take care of me.” A small, almost pleased smile lights on his face. Whatever part of him is still Bran Stark, it loves his sister. “So I accepted you into my service. I thought you would ask me to change the rules, but you didn’t. You sent him away, instead.”

Brienne flinches. She cannot help it. She hates when she shows discomfort in front of Bran, because he is her king, and because he can’t help what he is. She isn’t sure if it _bothers_ him, the fact that he’s a curiosity to most people and a massive source of existential discomfort to the ones who know him best. She knows that it would bother _her_.

But she can’t help it. _Sent him away_. It sounds so dismissive. As if an action that tore her heart in two was just…a simple thing. A whim.

And it isn’t true, anyway. She didn’t send Jaime anywhere. Jaime _chose _to go.

Brienne joined the Kingsguard for a lot of reasons. Some she still can’t articulate even now. But there was a bitter part of her that knew she couldn’t turn it down without looking like a lovestruck fool who couldn’t be grateful for the honor because it interfered with the affair she was having. It wasn’t like they were betrothed, or like they had ever even _talked _about marriage. It was an affair, a technically disgraceful affair between two people who came to care for one another in a war-torn world. Their story probably belonged to half of Westeros by the time the wars were done. With so little stability, so little peace, people were more apt to cling to the things that made them feel good. What would people say about the Kingslayer’s Whore if she turned down an honorable service because she’d rather continue fucking him?

Jaime had understood. She _knew _he did. She saw the look on his face when he accepted it, and she felt it on every inch of his body her hands touched when she fucked him for the last time. He _knew. _

“Ser Jaime accepted your sister’s offer to make him Hand. It was a good decision. He’s a much smarter man than he gives himself credit for.”

“Yes. He has been a great comfort to Sansa. It was right of him to stay in Winterfell, though it causes him pain. Same as your choice has caused pain to you.”

Brienne holds the pommel of her sword tighter. _It was the right choice_, she tells herself. _I made the right choice. I chose duty. I chose the honor of a good service. I chose the realm and the legacy of all the women who will come after me. _

“It was a choice I would gladly make again,” she manages.

“Not gladly,” Bran retorts, bland as ever. “But yes, you would make it. Why?”

“…why, your grace?”

“I have just told you that I do not need you. And even if I did need a seasoned knight by my side, there are plenty who would serve. You are exceptional, it is true. I suppose I should have told you that I would prefer you to guard my sister. I think you would be more of use in Winterfell. And I think that you would be happier. I did not consider it at the time.”

“My happiness isn’t…I didn’t choose this for my happiness. I chose this because it was the right choice to make.”

“It wasn’t,” Bran says. “There were better choices.”

“Perhaps there were, but I _chose_.” It is a struggle not to let her voice go as hard and firm as she wants it to go. A struggle to remember that he is the _king_, as much as he is also being an irritating boy.

“You chose at the expense of your own happiness. It was a noble choice. You said to Podrick once that you wished you had been weak enough to make a different one.”

It sends a chill through her, as ever, when he so casually discusses a private conversation as if he was a part of it. Perhaps she will never become used to it. Perhaps she will always fear the king just a bit, knowing that he _knows _she is afraid.

“I didn’t mean anything by that, your grace. It was a momentary fancy.”

“No it wasn’t. And it wouldn’t have been a weak choice, if you had chosen it. People have such odd ideas of strength. Doing your duty takes strength. Killing a bad man even though you know it will hurt you takes strength. Choosing to love takes strength. Choosing to rule takes strength. That’s all the world asks of us. Constant strength. Bran Stark was strong when he made his choices, and you have always been strong when you made yours. Nothing you would have chosen would have been weak.”

Brienne isn’t sure what to say. She feels very unmoored by his distant stare, and even more so by his insistence in continuing to bring this up. Not letting this drop. And hearing the things she has always privately despaired of spoken aloud as if they are plainly _ridiculous_. As if the notion of love being a terrifying force, a weakness, is absurd instead of the plain truth she thought it was.

“Perhaps it would not have been a weakness, your grace,” she says, not believing it. Not believing for a second that she could have made that choice without being ridiculed quietly and privately and out loud for all to hear. “But I chose what I thought was right.”

“That’s all any of us can do,” Bran says. “Are you sure you would choose the same now? If I had told you that I would have rewritten the vows, would you have allowed me to rewrite them?”

Brienne stares at him. Hesitates.

“I don’t know if…that is, I don’t think Ser Jaime…we never…”

“That will be all, Lord Commander,” Bran says, his eyes going distant once more, that small smile fading. “Thank you.”

* * *

She stands in the corridor outside for a long while, after. She watches out one of the narrow windows, looks over the still-desolate city. Rebuilding so slowly after all that happened. She feels irritated and confused and almost hurt by all the questions about choices and duty and love. She knows that Bran likes to understand things. Maybe he just didn’t understand why she would make what he plainly saw as an idiotic choice. Maybe he was reminding her that she _made_ that idiotic choice, asking her to reaffirm herself to his service because he can somehow tell that she thinks of Jaime too often and he wants to make sure that she does not go back on her duty now.

It’s too late, anyway. Surely he should be able to tell that she would never leave now. She made her choice, and she hurt Jaime. Whether he was left as broken-hearted and bereft as she feels or whether he was briefly stung, it was still pain, and she still caused it. It has been a year, and she has no idea if he would even choose to be with her now. He has found a purpose as Sansa’s Hand – a better purpose than she has as Bran’s unwanted guardian. She would not ask him to come back for anything in the world. Vows or no vows.


	5. so open up my eyes to a new light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really didn't think I would get this posted today! If there are any errors, it's because I've only read it over twice instead of my customary, like, five, so I'm sorry about that! I added this chapter in sort of last minute, because I originally had a SUPER long Brienne chapter, in which she had last chapter's conversation with Bran, followed by a conversation with Tyrion in which the events of this chapter are touched on. I decided breaking it up would be better. Plus, it didn't feel right not to include Sansa's annoyed concern for Jaime!

It starts with a slight cough. Sansa is the one to notice it first. 

“Are you all right?” she asks. She’s in a poor mood, anxious because they haven’t had any news of Theon yet, and it has been several days since he received Yara’s letter. The odds of the lad surviving everything that has been thrown at him for _years _only to then meet with some accident of travel during peacetime seem pretty low, but Sansa shares Jaime’s generally shitty outlook, so her mood has suffered, and so when she asks Jaime _are you all right_, it’s in a tone that seems more to say _stop coughing. You’re annoying me. _

“I don’t know _what’s _wrong with me,” Jaime admits.

Sansa’s mood grows even poorer as the day goes on, and Jaime knows why. _He’s _noticing it, too. Coughing. Not just him. Constantly, it seems, from every corner. Kitchen girls and wall guards and stablehands. Sansa disappears halfway through the day in a swirl of skirts, headed for the maester’s tower, and when she comes back, she herds Jaime into her quarters with her hand clasped around his elbow like a vice.

“A winter chill,” she says. “Nothing more.” But Sansa doesn’t operate like Robert did, and like Cersei did, and like Aerys did. She doesn’t look at a potential problem and find the easiest way to _stop _thinking about it. She looks at a small issue and she does her best to keep it from _becoming _a problem. He can tell already that her mind is whirling with whatever information she got from the maester.

“How many are sick?” he asks, smothering the tickle in his throat because the last thing she needs is to be reminded that he’s one of them.

“Dozens. Four seriously, but the cough is just the start. One man has taken to his bed already. Here.”

She hands him a small jar of some sort. When he opens it, he grimaces.

“What is _this_?”

“The maester said to rub it on your chest before you sleep. It will help you breathe.”

“I think I’d rather die. What’s that _smell_?”

“Rub it on your chest before you sleep,” Sansa growls, and Jaime laughs, but he tucks the jar away for later.

* * *

Things spiral, like they often do. The people of Winterfell and Wintertown are tired, and they’re hungry. Winter hasn’t been terribly severe, but it was already going to be a struggle with the amount of food that was destroyed by the fucking dragon queen, not to mention the amount of food her armies ate when they were waiting up north for the end of the world. Sansa did the best she could to prepare, but it was never going to be enough to keep the entire population hearty during a long winter. Weakened by hunger, when the people fall ill, they fall ill quickly.

Sansa takes charge, enlisting an army of women who roam the castle like angry bears, zeroing in on any coughers and bullying them down to see the maester. Sansa keeps people calm by constantly calling it _a winter chill_, though three people have died. All of them elderly or infirm, but it’s still enough to make Jaime worry.

Not for himself, of course. Sansa goads him constantly about rest, and she insists on his drinking broth and tea and all manner of ridiculous things.

“When I was sick as a child, do you know what my father did?” he asks one day, irritated by the way she keeps prodding the bowl of broth closer to him, goading him to eat it with very pointed looks.

“Something horrible and cruel that you’ll try to tell me was character building, no doubt,” Sansa replies dryly, which makes Jaime laugh.

“There’s no point in telling a story if you ruin the ending first.”

“_All _of your stories about your father are the same, and they all make so much _sense_. It must have been very sad for you and Tyrion.”

“Hmm,” Jaime says, pointedly, almost laughing, noting the absence.

“Can’t have been easy being Cersei, either. Maybe that’s why she was so…_her_.” Sansa looks at him like she wants him to challenge it, but he only laughs.

It has only been a year. He still misses his sister. He still grieves. But it’s quieter than it was. He can smile at the thought of her now. It’s not just…guilt and anger anymore.

“My father didn’t have much sympathy for weakness,” he says.

“_Weakness_,” Sansa spits, rolling her eyes. “Gods, sometimes you remind me of Robb. He was always pretending at being so _tough_. Once he hurt his wrist fighting. I think Theon or Jon hit him with a practice sword. I can still remember the way he strutted around with tears in his eyes, trying to pretend he wasn’t crying.” She lets out a very undignified snorting sound at the remembrance. “And you, always trying to pretend you aren’t about to cough. We all _know _you’ve caught it, Jaime. You aren’t fooling anyone.”

Jaime sighs and glares but does eventually take a sip of the broth.

“If this gets much worse, I don’t know if broth is going to fix it,” he says. “So far we’ve only lost the sick and old. If someone healthier dies, there will be panic.” Sansa’s frown falters, and she looks him over with a worry that is, actually, a bit touching. “I wasn’t talking about myself,” he says, and she rolls her eyes like she isn’t worried at all, but he can see the way she tenses.

* * *

Maybe, he thinks, Sansa will gloat about this later. He probably should have listened. He probably should have been a little more careful.

“You’re not as young as you were,” she was fond of saying, before he was bedridden. “If you get any worse…”

But that was just teasing, and he knows she probably regrets it now. He spends most of his days propped up against the pillows, coughing and wheezing weakly while the maester flits in and out and frets. Sansa sticks her head in throughout the day, but during the evenings she sits at his desk and writes the letters she needs to write – Oldtown, White Harbor, Jon, Tyrion. She reads them aloud as she does, and Jaime sleeps fitfully, soothed by the sound of her steady voice but woken frequently by his own weak coughing. After the first three nights, she rarely stays for more than a few minutes at a time. He often tries to ask her what’s going on beyond his prison, but she is tired, with mighty bruises under her eyes, and she doesn’t answer him, giving him instead some harmless platitudes about how she has everything under control, even though he knows she doesn’t.

The maester is more forthcoming. He tells Jaime about the sickrooms downstairs, and about the supplies running low. Jaime pretends that he doesn’t know whenever Sansa comes to visit. Sometimes he forgets.

* * *

“I think I do want to marry him,” she says one night. He is dozing, smelling that awful shit the maester insists is helpful even though Jaime is pretty sure he’s dying and the chest rub must be making him worse because it’s certainly not making him better. He knows that Sansa’s musings aren’t for him, really. If she wanted to say them aloud, she’d have done it when she knew he could hear her. He stays quiet. She’s embroidering something by the fire in his room. She told him a few days ago that it’s the only place she can find peace, because she’s almost gotten used to his infuriating coughing.

Sometimes, if he thinks of it, he feels _warm _about the clear worry in her eyes.

“If he ever arrives, I’ll tell him,” she says. “First thing. I’ll tell him that I love him. I won’t bungle it like you did.”

He huffs an involuntary laugh, and she chuckles.

“I knew you were awake,” she says.

“She knows,” he says quietly. “I told her.”

“You did? When?”

“Plenty.”

“I don’t just mean with gestures. I mean with words.”

“Told her with words.”

He struggles to sit up, and she casts him a look that’s slightly panicked but which she instantly smooths over into annoyance.

“Lie back down, you idiot,” she says.

“I told her,” he insists. “She _knew_. I didn’t want her to leave without knowing.”

Sansa sighs, and she folds up her embroidery primly. It’s a new tunic, he realizes. For Theon. He wants to mock her, a crooked grin flashing across his face, but then he starts coughing and can’t stop, and then Sansa is hovering over him, pushing him back against the pillows, propping him up, glaring at him.

“Why did she leave, if she knew?” Sansa asks. Jaime laughs at her, and coughs again.

For all she pretends to be a hardened woman now, changed irrevocably by her experiences, Jaime knows that this absurd romanticism is one way in which they remain pathetically similar. There’s something so naïve in her voice, in her expression. _Why did she leave if she knew?_ As if the very fact of his love should have been powerful enough to keep Brienne, and Sansa can’t comprehend why it wasn’t.

“It wasn’t enough,” he says. “It isn’t always.”

Sansa sighs, and she moves her chair beside his bed.

“You don’t like to talk about it seriously,” she says. “I know it upsets you. So you make jokes. Robb used to be like that about serious things. He never wanted to actually talk. And that’s what you do. You talk around it, or you act all dramatic on purpose so I roll my eyes and move on. But the maester said I should…tell them. Anyone who cares for you. Let them know that you’re unwell.”

“I’m not going to _die _of a winter chill,” Jaime insists weakly. “That would be _humiliating._ I’m the Kingslayer. Someone _needs _to cut off my head.”

“You’re doing it again. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re going to die, either. But I’m writing Tyrion, and he’ll…if I ask, he’ll tell Brienne whatever you said. Is there anything…?”

“I love her. I miss her. I don’t care about her fucking vows. I want her to come home. Something like that?”

“If you mean it.”

“Of _course _I mean it. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I was going to write that you’ve been calling out to her in your sleep.”

“Have I?”

“Yes.”

“Seven hells.”

“I know. It’s so pathetic.”

“A little sympathy would be nice.”

“I’ve got nothing _but _sympathy. I’m sick of it. Everyone dying. Everyone coughing. A few moons of peace and I let my guard down. I should have expected something like this. So many southerners move here after the war. Your bodies aren’t built for winter.”

“I really loathe you sometimes,” he laughs. Sansa smiles. It’s a bit watery and tense, but it’s more relaxed than it has been in days.

“Honestly, you can’t die. I’d have to pick a new Hand, and all my other options are so dreadful.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“I’m going to write that you said you love Brienne.”

“Go ahead. Tell her I call out for her in my sleep. Tell her the thing about me staring mournfully off your battlements. It won’t make a difference. Brienne swore an oath, and she won’t break it. Not even for love.”

“You could try to sound less pathetic when you say that.”

“I’m dying. I’m allowed to be pathetic.”

“You aren’t dying.” Sansa looks at him sternly. “You’re _not_.”

“I might be dying,” Jaime admits. He certainly feels like he is. He has a sudden fear. Panicked and not entirely rational. “You will tell her, won’t you? She should at least know I _still _do. I told her often enough, but…she’s always so stubborn. May have convinced herself that I changed my mind.”

“If you die too, I’m going to be _furious_,” Sansa says, and she reaches out, and she reaches for his hand. Her fingers close around his empty stump instead, but to her credit she doesn’t flinch or startle or yank her hand away. She clings to it. “You’ll get better.”

“I don’t know,” Jaime tries to tease. “I’m old and already lost one hand.”

“That has _nothing _to do with having caught an illness. _Gods, _you’re so annoying.”

But she’s smiling, and he has to smile back, and he thinks of Myrcella again, staring up at him, smiling. _Father_, she had said.

“Brienne,” he says, drifting. “She should know.”

* * *

Sometimes, he thinks he’s with the Mummers again. That was the last time he felt this wretched and confused, his own body turning against him. There’s a woman constantly over him, watching over him, but it isn’t Brienne like it was before. He asks for her. He doesn’t get her, and he knows she’s dead. He knows they’ve taken her despite his clever lies about sapphires.

Then he's burning. Every bit of him burning, and he can’t…it’s Aerys. Aerys standing in front of him. Laughing. Always laughing. _Sansa_. She’s here somewhere. Ned Stark is approaching, drawing his sword, and Jaime knows that if Ned reaches Aerys first, everything will be finished. Ned won’t kill Aerys. Only Jaime can. And if Jaime doesn’t, then Sansa will die.

He drifts, for a while. Sleeps and wakes and coughs and struggles to breathe. There’s vomit and shit as there always is, and there’s a woman who helps him sit up, and who cleans him, but it isn’t Brienne. It should be Brienne. She’s the only one he trusts.

* * *

When he returns at last from the fog, he is weaker than he was, and his cough lingers, but the maester insists that the worst has passed. Four days, the maester says. For four days, Jaime has been insensible.

“How many have we lost?” Jaime asks. The maester hesitates.

“Twenty-nine dead,” he finally says. “There are twelve or so we still aren’t sure of. The worst symptoms hit nearly a hundred, all told, between Winterfell and Wintertown.”

“The queen?”

“A minor cough, for a few days. That’s as bad as it got.”

“Bloody Starks,” Jaime grumbles, and the maester laughs weakly. “Where is she?”

“Working with the sick.”

“Of course she is.”

“And before you ask, I’m to tell you that you’re not to get out of bed, especially not if you’re just going to try and, um.”

“Go on. Give me her exact words.”

“Especially if you’re just going to ‘act like an old, miserable septa about it’, my lord,” the maester says, and Jaime laughs along with him.

For the first time since he listened to Brienne and chose not to ride back to Kings Landing to die, Jaime finds that he is very glad to be alive. Not just happy not to be dead, but _glad _to be alive. The full-bodied appreciation for life that he felt when he was released from the Riverrun dungeon, when even the simple feeling of sunlight on his skin made him feel like life was an incredible gift. He can’t take very sharp breaths, and he knows he isn’t yet fully recovered, and Sansa is going to drive him _mad_, refusing to let him out of bed before she’s sure he’s well.

But he’s here. He’s alive. Even _Brienne _feels closer than she used to.


	6. say something, something like you love me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's a long one for you since I'm pretty sure I won't be able to post tomorrow! Boy I really wish I hadn't decided to split these chapters up by perspectives, but I promise there's only a few more left!

Bran’s confusing looks and inquiries and his seeming expectations have Brienne defensive for a few weeks, but they are nothing compared to Tyrion when he pulls out a crumpled letter during one of their private meetings. The Hand of the King has seemed distracted all throughout, but it has meant fewer jokes, so Brienne has swallowed her questions and her discomfort and has allowed him his secrets.

Except then she stands to leave, and he tells her, and it’s so much worse than Bran’s unspoken expectations, because Tyrion doesn’t seem to expect anything of her at all.

“You asked me once not to talk about my brother,” he says. His eyes have been shadowed all through the meeting, but they look worse now, exhausted, and Brienne feels a horrible lurch, like a muted version of what she felt the night she heard Jaime scream out of the dark when they took his hand. “But I am selfish, and I want _someone_ to worry with me.”

“What is it?” Brienne asks.

“An illness has been ravaging Winterfell. A simple chest infection, for the most part, but there have been a few fatalities, and they’re having trouble combating it. Jaime…” Tyrion sighs, and his fist tightens around the parchment like an involuntary motion. “My big brother has been struck rather badly with it. He’s been running a high fever, and he has taken a turn for the worse. King Bran delivered the news this morning. He says Sansa is worried about him. She’s trying to keep the extent of his illness as far from the public eye as she can, but he has been insensible for several days now, and she fears the worst. She wrote me this letter a few days ago, it seems, when Jaime was still lucid. She seemed unconcerned, but of course Bran’s information is more…up-to-date.”

Brienne sits. She hardly registers the action. She holds tighter to the pommel of her sword, closing her eyes.

“Oh,” she says. To think of Jaime Lannister, the Kingslayer, brought so low by a simple _illness_…but she’s seen him so weak before. She held him while he shivered, and she cared for him when he was sick. She didn’t even_ like_ him then. Maybe her love has made him seem more infallible, but she has so much trouble now imagining him brought low and weak. She wishes she could see him. When she opens her eyes, Tyrion is looking at her curiously. Sadly.

“I know things didn’t end well between you, but I know you cared for him, and…”

“Didn’t end well?” Brienne interrupts, frowning.

“Well, I was being polite, but if you’d like me to skip the part where I mince words and you pretend you’ve no idea what I’m really saying: you left him, and you broke his heart.”

The matter-of-fact way he speaks the words is crueller than a blatant accusation of uncaring would be. She feels momentarily made short of breath by it. He seems resigned. Not angry. Not confused. Just _resigned_, as if this foreign concept is something he just _knows _as truth, even though it can’t possibly be.

“What?” she asks. “I didn’t…Jaime understood. It wasn’t like _that_.”

“Of course he understood. My idiot brother is quite used to being set aside for something more important than his heart. And I’m sure he was very noble and dignified about it to your face, because he would not want you to feel guilty, but I know my brother. He loved you, and his heart was shattered by your choice. I’m not trying to _blame_ you. You wouldn’t be the first person to choose a path down which love could not follow. Jaime’s just…well. You knew him as well as anyone, I suppose. Love was always his biggest weakness.”

He laughs a little, as if it’s a fun remembrance of someone already dead, and Brienne bristles.

“Jaime didn’t _love_ me,” she insists. But that’s not quite right, because she knows he did. He told her often enough, and she knew how to tell when he was lying. He did love her. Just not in the way Tyrion is implying, like it was the same as what Brienne felt for _him. _That feeling of attachment, of choice, of knowing that this one person above all else was the one for her. That was not the way Jaime loved Brienne. It was the way he loved his sister. “If his heart was shattered by anything, it was by Cersei’s death. My choice …I’m sure it did hurt him, and I’m sorry for that. But you’re overvaluing his attachment to me.”

Tyrion laughs again.

“Do you really believe that? Of course he _loved_ you. He went to Winterfell for you. He stayed in Winterfell for you.”

“We cared for each other, yes. I’m not saying we didn’t. But he…”

“Let me save you the outraged confusion. Jaime doesn’t feel things the way we do. Or the way I do, anyway. I don’t presume to know anything about what’s gone on with you. Have you ever wondered why Jaime looks the way he does and yet has only ever been with two women? At his age? Women practically fall out of windows trying to get a look at him as he walks past. I can’t tell you the number of times he has gone to his rooms and found some willing beauty in his bed. He’s always very polite about it. Very annoyed, too. What a mortal man would consider a gift from the gods, Jaime considers a minor nuisance. He has the same reaction as if he found a fly in his stew. His good looks are entirely wasted on him.”

“He’s loyal,” Brienne argues. “I know you’re mocking him, but it’s a good quality.”

She has, to her own shame and guilt, thought often of the fact that she is the only other woman Jaime has ever been with. Some covetous pride that it was _her_, Brienne the Beauty, who was able to loosen Cersei’s hold on her twin, however little that hold was released. The most beautiful woman in the seven kingdoms, and it was Brienne who was enough to borrow her lover’s heart. _Brienne_ who made Jaime choose to live rather than dying with Cersei like she wanted him to.

“It is loyalty, yes. I’ll give you that,” Tyrion admits, leaning forward with his hands clasped together. “But Jaime has never felt any desire to fuck anyone but our sister. He told me, more than once. He could look at the most beautiful woman the world over, and he would feel no more than a passing interest. He used to say it was just because no woman could compare to Cersei, but as beautiful as she was, I’ve seen women who compare, and they meant nothing to him. It’s just the way Jaime loves. Completely. Fully. His own body refuses to fuck any woman he doesn’t feel that absurd dedication for. And yet he fucked you.” He looks at her pointedly. “Jaime loved you. Not as a whim, or a curiosity, or a friend turned bedmate at the end of the world. That isn’t _Jaime. _He loved you. According to the contents of this letter, he says he loves you still. He says he doesn’t care about your vows. He wants you to come home. The things a man says in his cups and in the midst of a fever are often the most honest ones. I don’t know if you truly didn’t understand that or if you’re using ignorance as a way to pretend to yourself that your choice only hurt him a medium amount, but I’m supposed to be the clever one who’s good at self-deception and you’re supposed to be the sickening, self-sacrificing paragon, so I refuse to allow you to pretend.”

Brienne finds that she has to swallow back several very cruel things that she knows wouldn’t be honorable to say. Tyrion still doesn’t sound like he’s trying to be cruel. He sounds like this is information he’s sure Brienne has already accepted about herself. About Jaime. She looks at the parchment in his hands and she wants to read Sansa's words for herself, like she will find some kernel of information that will allow her to dismiss them.

“I chose what I thought was right for all of us,” she says, beginning to stammer, feeling horridly tongue-tied like she used to get when she was a girl. “I didn’t think that Jaime would be… I thought he would _understand_. It was an honor I couldn’t... I thought I…that is, I didn’t think I should turn it down for something as simple as…as affection. Love, even if I thought my regard was deeper than his. It was still love.”

“Oh, something as simple as love, yes. Just that pesky, unimportant little emotion.”

“It would have been seen as a…” she starts to say, the words_ weak choice of a woman’s heart_, but then she frowns, remembering Bran’s words about strength in choosing love.

“A weakness?” Tyrion guesses, unsurprisingly. He _has _come to know her well in this past year. “A moral failing to choose to follow the path you wanted to follow and not the one that you thought most people _wanted _you to follow? I’ve heard you say things before, at small council meetings. Decrying qualities that you find lacking in your own sex, like you want all of us to remember that you're _different_. But you forget who I am. I don’t know how you could, with us staring at each other’s stupid faces every miserable, boring day. But I suppose familiarity does breed obliviousness in some ways. I want you to look at me, Brienne. Really look at me. My legs. My gait. Take it in.”

“I am looking at you,” Brienne says shortly. What does this have to do with anything? Jaime is _sick_, and Tyrion wants to talk about the fact that he’s a dwarf?

“Then you should see how much I’m like yourself. Oh, much shorter, yes. And far more charming. But I can see you better than almost anyone else. You see, I spent my adolescence trying to convince myself that I didn’t _want_ to be a knight. I didn’t want to fight in any stupid battles or tourneys like the brother I worshipped. No, that was for people who weren’t as clever as me! I wanted to be a maester or a juggler or a dragon rider. I very conveniently wanted to be anything that a man of my height could be good at. Certainly not a knight, not a warrior, on their too-tall horses, with their heavy armor and their heroism. _No_, I was too smart to want something I could obviously never be!” The deep sarcasm and knowing tone of Tyrion’s voice make her look down at her legs, clad in the armor of the Kingsguard. Unsuited for dresses and dancing, but perfect for plate and chainmail and standing firm against an enemy force. Tyrion’s voice softens. “People are often thrust into roles they didn’t want just by virtue of poor luck and a shit world that demands shit things of us. People like you and I know it better than anyone, and that’s the reason I can see it in you. It was in me, once, too. Probably still would be, if I allowed myself a moment to think about it.” He leans forward a bit, his elbows on the desk, and there is nothing but sincerity in his tone now. “How old were you when you realized you would never be a maiden from a song?”

Brienne hates this. Hates that he has seen this. It’s like with Jaime that first time. Opening her shirt. Baring herself and trusting that he wouldn’t hurt her or mock her or look at her with disgust.

“Young,” she answers.

“You grew taller than the boys quickly, I expect. Did your septa try to lie to you about it? Or did she despair of you?”

“I think she hated me,” Brienne confesses. “But she tried to prepare me as best as she could.”

“Yes, I’m sure she was all kindness and charity.”

“She told me to keep the chambers as dark as I could on my wedding night so my husband would not have to look on me,” Brienne says, unsure why she’s telling him this. He laughs bitterly. Maybe that’s why. No one else would understand.

“Yes, quite a virtuous woman, obviously. So you had two choices before you. You could choose to keep trying to fit yourself into the box of the maiden. Wear dresses that tried their hardest to contain you. Curtsey like it would make a difference. Learn womanly arts as best you could in the hopes that some lesser Lord would _endure_ you. Or you could be something else. The warrior. You were already tall. Probably already strong. And the first time you took a blade in your hands, I bet it felt exactly right.”

“It’s what I was made for,” Brienne says, helpless, quiet.

“Yes, I rather think it is. Did I ever tell you about the Battle of Blackwater?”

“Too many times.”

“Yes, well my point in bringing it up is that I armored myself. I armed myself. I went out into battle. I fought. Me! Tyrion Lannister! The dwarf, the Imp, the half man. I fought, and I killed. I’ll never be a knight, Brienne. Hand of the King is a fulfilling enough office, but I still touched that childhood fantasy with the tips of my fingers, and I _adored_ it. Oh, the _thrill_ of it. And half the joy was in knowing that it was something that the world didn’t want me to have. I would wager that the first time you realized that my brother wanted you, _truly_ wanted you, you felt something of the same.”

Brienne remembers it. Startling, fizzling, bright. This feeling like something had gnawed a hole in her chest and was trying to fill it. Punching deep and dragging breath out of her. Her first kiss with Jaime. Realizing that he wanted her. _He_ wanted _her_. A beautiful, famous man. A man she loved.

“It felt like sneaking a snack from the larder while my septa slept,” Brienne admits with a quiet smile.

“Yes, I bet it did. And when he stayed with you. When you woke in the morning with his arm around your waist and his arousal poking into your backside and you realized that he still wanted you?”

She had woken with her arm around _his_ waist, and it wasn’t until he rolled over on top of her and kissed her that she realized he was hard, but she understands Tyrion’s point.

“It felt like it unbalanced all the rules I thought I understood about the world.”

“Which made it all the sweeter.”

“Yes.”

“Those of us who lack the things we are supposed to have – height, form, charisma, feminine arts – if we want to survive in a world like this one, we have to either get very good at dealing with disappointment or we have to get very good at convincing ourselves that we don’t want the things we cannot have. Before Blackwater, I would have sworn to you on pain of death that fighting in a battle was the last thing I wanted to do. And maybe it would have even been true. I had trained myself not to want it. Not to be curious about it. Because what was the point of making myself unhappy? Much easier to reach for the things that I knew I _could_ have and grumble about idiotic knights and their foolish chivalry. Just as I imagine it’s easier for you to criticize needlepointing skills and womanly wiles than it is to admit that you’ve never had the talent.”

“It is,” Brienne admits. She remembers how baffling she found Catelyn Stark, and her daughters after her. Women and girls who were still women and girls but who were nothing like the horrible, pretty girls she always imagined when she was growing up. The girls who wouldn’t want her company because she was too ugly and slow-witted and didn’t have the patience for dancing around a subject. Even Margaery Tyrell was kind. Womanly and kind. Olenna, too. She saw strength in all of them. Not the strength of iron and stone out of which she had long carved herself, but a strength that was no less real.

“It doesn’t stop us from wanting those things. Deep down, perhaps, but that want is still there. It just serves to make us feel guilty for wanting something we have tried to convince ourselves we loathe. Instead of realizing a healthy balance is possible, we scorn the people we can’t be like and we cling to the ideals that we _can_.”

“It isn’t as simple as all that,” Brienne says. “You’re not wrong. I understand what you’re saying. But it isn’t so simple.”

“No, of course it isn’t. My brother was never going to be an easy person to love.”

“He is. He’s a very easy person to love.”

“Then what? Why give him up for _this_?”

“I don’t know.”

She admits it finally, her voice strained. There are reasons she did and reasons she shouldn’t have and reasons she understands and reasons she maybe never will. It wasn’t any one thing. It was honor and obligation and duty just as much as it was fear and certainty that choosing Jaime would lead to nothing good, in the end.

“Is it because you didn’t believe he loved you?”

“It wasn’t as simple as that,” she argues softly. “It was a lot of things.”

“I am sure, if you asked Bran…”

“It’s too late, Tyrion,” she says. She thinks of Jaime ill, maybe dying. She thinks of him saying those things to Sansa. There is a part of her that wishes to get on a horse and ride for Winterfell, even though she knows it wouldn’t do any good. But she swore a vow, and as useless as it is turning out to be, she will not break it. Tyrion was perhaps right in that her choices were, in some ways, acts of self-sabotage. But they have been made. Her convictions are weaker, but they are still hers. “I have made my choices.”

“Yes, that’s what life is, really. A series of choices. You make some choices. Then you make some more. Then you make even _more_. And then you die.” He gives her a very significant look. “You’re not dead yet, Brienne.”


	7. I will learn to love the skies I'm under

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you know, I considered, like a reasonable person, just...skipping a day of posting? Because I'm going to be at a (game of thrones!) concert tomorrow and won't have a chance to post at all. But then like an UNreasonable person, I decided that I could just post 2 chapters today! This was a decision made at 10:30 PM, so it's a little chaotic, but...

The day Theon Greyjoy returns to Winterfell is the first day Jaime’s been allowed out of his rooms in weeks.

The illness had swept through Winterfell like the armies of the dead. It hadn’t ripped apart the foundations of the castle the way the dead had, and to look around the courtyard it would seem as if everything is in place, but it has that same shocked feeling of survival. The confusion of living when so many others haven’t been so lucky.

Theon wrote from White Harbor when he arrived at port and heard that Winterfell was under siege from the illness, wanting to head in despite all the warnings. But he listened when Sansa begged him in a letter to wait out the worst of it.

Ever since the maester told her it was safe and she was able to send off another letter to summon him, _Sansa _has been the one doing all those mournful sighs on battlements. Waiting for any sign.

Jaime has been a bit of an asshole about it, but maybe less than he would have been in the past. Sansa knows too much of his heart now, after seeing him in the throes of his fever. She can call his bluff more easily. And besides, she sent that letter to Tyrion. She’s not the only one who has been exposed.

He remembers very little about those few days of the worst of his illness. He remembers a maester above him. He remembers Sansa frowning at him and trying to goad him into fighting back. Calling him old and useless while he tried to laugh. He remembers dreams. Walking through the Winterfell crypt, fleeing from Ned Stark’s headless remains. Standing beside the throne, watching Aerys burn Tywin and Cersei and Tyrion alive. Fighting the Bloody Mummers as they held him down and cut off his other hand while Sansa screamed at them to leave him alone and Brienne tried to fight them all.

When he was awake again, he was shaky and dehydrated but otherwise _fine_, but Sansa didn’t let him get out of bed for a few days more. Given their age difference and his frankly pathetic desire to do some actual parenting in his advancing age, he has always attempted some sort of paternal manners for his queen, but she was very motherly in those first few days. Not the sweet, gentle mothering he remembers from the long-dead Joanna Lannister, but much more Catelyn Stark than he was comfortable with. Lots of glaring while she shoved bread at him and forced him to eat. He could see from the tightness around her mouth that she was worried for him, and he feels guilty for being such a shitty patient, so getting out of bed and standing beside her to receive Theon in the courtyard seems like the least he can do.

Winterfell still looks a little depleted after the illness. Coughing can be heard from the battlements; soldiers desperately trying to smother the sounds. Jaime’s own chest rattles if he takes too deep a breath, but the fresh air tastes sweet, and he feels more whole than he has since he came back to Winterfell after leaving Brienne behind. It’s a sorry sight that will greet the returning ward, but Theon has seen it looking far worse.

Finally, the gates open, and Theon rides through.

He’s alone, and he seems surprised to see Sansa and Jaime waiting for him. Sansa briefly grips Jaime’s arm without looking at him, like she needs to remember he’s still there before she takes a few queenly steps forward. Theon dismounts his horse immediately and bends the knee before her. Everyone else in the courtyard has gone silent, waiting. It feels a bit nice to no longer be the man in Winterfell about whom the northerners are the most annoyingly conflicted.

“Your grace,” Theon says, and Sansa gestures minutely for him to stand up, her hands fluttering uncertainly until he does, and then she flings her arms around him. She’s smiling larger than she has in the year since she became queen. Jaime’s only slightly insulted.

“Welcome home, Theon,” she says.

* * *

There’s a feast to welcome Theon back. It’s a lackluster feast at best, with not very much food and so many people still sick, but there’s music and dancing and mead, so the notherners are pleased enough by it, being the simple people that they are. Some of them are a bit grumbly about welcoming a man who once betrayed them (_another _man, technically), but Theon’s godswood heroics and almost-death at the hands of the Night King are more recent, and they all remember the way Sansa had personally attended to Theon when he was injured, and they also probably remember the silently dramatic, tortured way she watched him leave once the wars were done and Theon judged that he was needed on the islands of his birth.

Sansa might not be entirely sure of where she stands with Theon, but Jaime is. He was certain even when Theon was leaving, because the boy’s chin trembled and he couldn’t meet her eyes. Jaime knows what it’s like to make the choice to leave in part because you think you aren’t worthy of the woman you love. He also knows what it’s like to change your mind. Theon just got a bit farther and took a bit longer than he did.

Theon is obvious now, watching Sansa lead and dance and pay courtesies to the lords. He mostly stays in his seat, wearing the new tunic Sansa made for him. He’s savvy about his place here, and about the fact that he’s being carefully watched. He’s perfectly respectful to everyone who speaks to him, only looking uncomfortable a few times. Mostly his eyes trail Sansa's unmistakable form as she moves across the floor. He makes eye contact with Jaime briefly, and Jaime raises a wine glass in recognition, and Theon grants him with a small, private smile. He seems more whole than he was when he was here last. Fighting in the Long Night had changed him, given him back something that he had plainly been convinced he had lost, but he was still sort of formless and aimless when he left. Now, there’s confidence where there wasn’t before. A sense of purpose. Jaime knows the feeling.

He’s still not wholly recovered from his illness, and he knows by now that the later it gets, the bolder the serving girls become in trying to persuade him to take one of them to bed. Better to make an early retreat. He makes for the door, bowing his head slightly in Sansa’s direction as a goodnight, but she flits in his direction and pushes a piece of parchment into his hand that she has pulled from some hidden pocket in her dress.

“I received this from the maester earlier,” she tells him. “Read it. And thank you.”

“For what?” he asks.

“For standing by me.”

“You don’t have to thank me for that. I’m your Hand.”

But Sansa is red-cheeked and happy and has plainly had a few goblets of _something _to drink. She shakes her head.

“You’re my friend, more importantly,” she tells him. She barely has to stand on her toes to kiss his cheek. Sweet and childlike for a moment. Nothing like the cold northern queen those lords insist on gossiping about.

“I think if you asked Theon to dance, he might actually kiss you on the spot,” Jaime says, feeling growing fondness for his daught- for the _queen_. Gods, maybe Sansa isn’t the only one slightly drunk. Sansa turns to look at the Ironborn, who is currently enduring a long screed from a man with a bushy white beard. One of them. There are so fucking many. Who _are_ all these northern lords, anyway?

“He seems different. Better than he was.” She turns to him to see if his opinion aligns with hers, and he nods.

“I think he’s happy to be home,” Jaime says. “But yes. He seems a bit less ready to die.”

Sansa gives him another little smile, and then she squeezes the parchment in his hand: a reminder.

“Read it,” she says, before she’s off again in a swirl of skirts.

* * *

Jaime trudges back up to his room and gratefully unbuckles his golden hand. He leaves it off most days, because the cold makes the injury ache badly enough without the weight of the prosthetic on the end of it, but he’d worn it all day today. He wanted to put in a bit of an effort for something that was so important to Sansa, though he knows she would never ask him to. The skin of his wrist is red and uncomfortable underneath, and he’s annoyed with himself for still feeling that flicker of Tywin-Lannister-inspired need to hide the shame of the missing limb.

He thinks of Brienne, her fingers wrapped around it, her lips pressed to it, the first time he tried to hide it from her. Recoiling after accidentally reaching for her with it when he was sleepy and in that halfway space where he forgot about the stump and was only looking to touch her with as many fingers as possible. Cersei had always hated it. Brienne seemed to know exactly the right thing to do to remind him how different she was from his sister.

He sets the stupid prosthetic in his bedside drawer, and then opens the parchment that Sansa gave him. A letter from Tyrion, and his face eases into a smile to see his little brother’s cramped, miniscule writing as he makes himself comfortable in the chair by the fire.

His good spirits last, oh, several lines into the letter.

Most of it is just politeness and updates and little in-jokes that must have developed in the year that Sansa and Tyrion have been writing to each other. He’s not sure of the context of many of Tyrion’s remarks, but he isn’t surprised. Sansa likes to keep her letters private.

He understands why, now. Far too much of it is about him. And even more of it is about Brienne.

_Of course she isn’t happy_, Tyrion has written._ And of course her own unhappiness doesn’t bother her, because for some reason we people (perhaps especially women, I’ll agree with you this once) are taught to bear our unhappiness because I suppose happiness would be a sign that we aren’t morally good enough or some such foolishness_.

_She misses him_.

Jaime reads through the letter slowly, carefully, wanting desperately to skip ahead to the end but not trusting himself not to make mistakes in his haste. He has always been a poor reader.

He has avoided speaking of Brienne as much as possible since he woke from his illness, and he has avoided thinking about her when he can, but the truth is that she is never very far from his thoughts. He can play the part of dutiful Hand well enough, and he has learned to enjoy his duties, and he is happier in his service to his northern queen than he would have expected, but it has always been connection to others that drives him. Love, more than anything else. Everything he has ever done, he has done it for love in some way or another. He dragged himself out of bed this morning out of the love he feels for Sansa and the desire to be by her side when she faced something she was worried about. The love he felt for Cersei – well. He did plenty of horrible things for that. And the love he feels for Brienne, it guides everything, even when she’s not here. He does stupid, dutiful things because they are the exact kinds of stupid, dutiful things that Brienne would be proud of him for doing, and he avoids looking at that fact too closely both because he knows it’s pathetic and because he knows it’s fucking _incurable_.

If he were a man like any other, if he were a man who could be fickle with his heart, he’d probably be a much happier one. And there was a part of him that hoped that Brienne would find peace in her choice and in her service to the king, but there is a horrible and selfish monster inside him that’s ravenous for this news, this proof that she regrets it. However long they have been apart, and however little hope there is that they’ll see each other again, at least he isn’t the only one wishing and dreaming and maybe even hoping.

_Bran has spoken to her of it, I know_, Tyrion has written. _She’s embarrassed to be so seen, but we are all used to it by now. Speaking of, Bran tells me that your own lost love will be returning to you soon. I imagine he will be safely in the walls of Winterfell by the time you receive this letter. Bronn has kindly offered to send along a list of ways that you and your love could find pleasure in each other despite his…limitations. I told him to send it to you directly because I wouldn’t be party to it. If you receive a raven from Bronn (you’ll know because of the atrocious penmanship, worse than Jaime’s) kindly cast it into the fire without opening it, unless you’re interested. And don’t tell me if you are. I don’t want to know these things of my former child bride. _

_I’ll write again soon with the answers to your questions from the King, but I wanted to get this letter off in the meantime. I am grateful to hear that my brother is recovering nicely, and unsurprised that he has called out for our mutual friend in his sleep. She, by the way, turned a very lovely shade of green when I told her that he was ill, though she struggled to hide it, and she spent the next three days pointedly refusing to ask me for updates while loitering around unnecessarily until I put her out of her misery and told her that Bran reported that Jaime was on the mend. It would have been more fun to play with her, but she was trying to sneak a look at some other correspondence on my desk for news, and I didn’t want her to see anything that shocked her. _

_Please tell Jaime that he is in our thoughts. I hope he isn’t too wretched. Tell him that there is hope yet. His lady misses him, and there is so little work to do. A few more pushes and, well. One never knows with King Bran_.

Jaime reads the letter three times before he finally folds it up carefully and tucks it away.

He is, at turns, angry, hopeful, and woeful.

He has gotten used to this. Living _after_ her, after Brienne. He has accepted it. He doesn’t have to like it to accept it, and he doesn’t have to “get over her”, as so many of the girls in the kitchens are fond of advising. It was like losing the hand, almost. Just learning to live without it. Adjusting. Not to say that if the gods offered his hand back now, he wouldn’t jump at the chance. The same is true with Brienne. He has learned to adjust to the absence, and he has overcome the difficulties that came with it, and the idea that he might have some hope…

Well, maybe the comparison isn’t a perfect one, because it isn’t as if anyone has ever given him a hint of hope that his bloody _hand_ will grow back. But if they ever did, he imagines it would feel a little like this. Terrifying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chaotic Me: I feel like I should just post two chapters. This story's moving too slowly anyway  
Reasonable Me: You've been posting a chapter a day while also doing a TON of shit in your personal life. It's moving way faster than it needs to.   
Chaotic Me: I'll post two chapters today, how about that?


	8. what would you have me do?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lmao this chapter isn't even 1000 words. This is the downside to writing things on your phone and without more than a bare plot figured out! So I'm going to post this and the Jaime chapter at the same time. And then I think I'll try to finish the fic off entirely later! Just a couple more chapters to go, and I'm going to be really busy coming up, so I want to get this squared away.

“Got a nice thank you letter from your former wife,” Bronn says, leering as usual, leaning back in his seat, looking unbearably smug about it. Tyrion covers his ears like a child and shakes his head.

“No, stop. Shut up. I don’t want to hear it. Brienne, please report on _anything_. Anything at all. I’ll take a suspicious child loitering around the Keep. I’ll take an old woman who wrote a song about me that rhymed ‘runt’ with ‘cunt’. Literally anything.”

“I have nothing to report,” Brienne says helplessly. Bronn snickers. Davos sighs.

“There’s an ongoing dispute between…?” he starts.

“The Dornish shipcaptain was correct,” Bran offers. Davos sighs and tucks away his papers.

“Good to know,” he says with obvious relief. “I’ll take care of it.”

“I know you will,” Bran says, and Tyrion laughs.

“Well, that might be a record,” he says, standing up. “Shortest small council meeting in the history of time. Podrick, make a note. This deserves a celebration.”

“It _was_ the shortest, actually,” Bran informs them with mild interest. Bronn’s the one who laughs this time.

It isn’t that Bran has become any less…odd. But there’s an ease that comes with time, and they’re all less unnerved by him than they used to be. Besides, it’s easy sometimes to see where he’s _trying_ to make jokes, or at least make his fellow members of the council amused. And those are comfortingly human moments.

“Make sure you mark the date for the history books, Pod,” Brienne says, and Bronn slaps her on the back.

“There we go! Even got _you_ in on the fun this time. Speaking of: time for me to have some fun of my own.”

“Tansy is pregnant, but the child isn’t yours,” Bran says. Brienne cannot stifle a disapproving sigh. Bran continues blithely. “She’ll try to say it is.” Bronn points in his direction.

“Thanks for the tip, your grace,” he says, waving on his way out the door. As always, Brienne is glad to see him go. There are some things that she has become used to over time, but Bronn remains utterly unpredictable.

Podrick moves to wheel Bran out of the room, but the king holds up his hand to stop him.

“I would like to speak with you both,” he says, turning his gaze from Brienne to Tyrion. The others leave, Podrick and Davos, chatting about whatever was going on with that Dornish shipcaptain. Bran barely waits until they’re gone. “There is to be a wedding at Winterfell. My sister will marry Theon Greyjoy.”

Tyrion rarely looks truly surprised, but he does now, eyebrows raising.

“That was rather quick,” he says. “The boy has been back there, what, a few weeks? Though I’m sure she’s eager to produce an heir. Better get started as soon as possible with that cock he definitely has.”

Bran gifts Tyrion with a very unimpressed look that seems to remind him that, though he may not be as _present_ as he once was, Bran is still Sansa’s brother.

“Will we be attending the wedding, your grace?” Brienne asks. Tyrion gives her a grateful look for the change of subject that she pretends not to see.

“I will watch,” Bran says. “But I cannot make the journey now. I’m needed here. I thought I would send the two of you.”

Brienne’s breath catches.

“Ah,” Tyrion says. “I see.”

He looks at Brienne with an openly mischievous expression. Brienne knows from experience that she is probably going quite red.

“You have unfinished business in Winterfell,” Bran says to her, as if that’s not a humiliating thing to say. To Tyrion, he says, “Sending _you_ looks good. Politically.”

Tyrion gives him an acknowledging nod and a broad grin. Brienne stands helplessly and looks between the two of them.

“I should be here to protect you,” she says. Bran looks at her for a moment, and then he turns to Tyrion. Without needing to be told, Tyrion bows and leaves the room, leaves Brienne alone with this odd king and his confusing agenda.

“You’re afraid to see him again. You shouldn’t be. He wants to see you.”

“I can’t,” Brienne says. She has never admitted such weakness before. “I can’t see him again. I’ll...”

“You’re afraid that you’ll realize you made a mistake. You already know you did.”

“No, your grace. That’s not what I…”

“It’s true,” Bran says. He always sounds so bored when he rejects her attempts to defend herself. It always makes Brienne feel even more foolish than she already does. “Tyrion was right to mention his own dreams of knighthood. It helped me better understand you. That’s why you’re afraid. You will see him and you won’t be able to pretend anymore that there is nothing you want more than a good service to a king you admire. It’s all right. I understand.”

“How could you understand?” Brienne asks.

“I dreamed of being a knight too,” Bran says with a small smile. “If you leave tomorrow morning, you should arrive at Winterfell on the morning of the wedding. After the ceremony that night, you will stay in the godswood until the other guests are gone. I will be there. You won’t see me, but I will be there. And you will let me know.”

“Let you know?”

“What you have decided.” He is still looking at her in that way that makes her feel utterly bared before him, and she is so ashamed and hopeful and afraid all at once. “It is time for you to make another choice.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I imagine that everyone is really freaked out by Bran, and Bronn SOMETIMES is, but mostly he's just like "hey, what's the weirdest shit you've ever seen?" and he probably thinks Bran is hilarious.


	9. and use my head alongside my heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I don't have any clever notes for you except to note that if I wasn't such a sap, I'd say Sansa should just escort HERSELF through the godswood. But I AM a sap, so.

“I really do hate it out here,” Jaime mutters, flexing his cold fingers in his glove as he and Sansa take a slow turn through the godswood, near the terrifying tree he hates so much. They’ve already done it once this morning, but Sansa has insisted on double-checking to make sure every decoration is in place, and Theon is already off overseeing the mead delivery from White Harbor, so Jaime agreed to follow her around.

“It’s beautiful,” Sansa insists, tucking her arm through his maimed one and patting his stump. “I always feel like my father is watching over me out here.”

“Maybe that’s the problem,” Jaime murmurs thoughtfully, which makes Sansa laugh.

“He would like you, you know.”

“He most assuredly did not.”

“No, not as you were. But you aren’t the same man anymore.”

“No,” Jaime agrees. “He still wouldn’t like me, though. I would never be able to resist mocking him. For all the ways I’ve changed, I haven’t learned to be much more diplomatic. I’ve just gotten lucky and sworn myself to a queen who’s as prickly as I am. If he were here, I’d still be helpless to stop myself. It’s in my blood.”

“To mock Starks? I’m a Stark.”

“Half Stark, half Tully. I liked your mother, so I only mock you half as much as I would otherwise.”

“Hmm,” Sansa agrees with a quiet chuckle. “Well, Jon likes you now, and Jon is probably most like my father out of all of us, so I still say he would have liked you.”

“Jon doesn’t like me.”

“Of course he does. He told me I couldn’t have chosen a better Hand.”

“Huh. He was looking at me yesterday like he wanted to wring my neck.”

“That’s just how he looks. That awful Wildling beard of his doesn’t help. I ordered him sheared before the ceremony.”

“It was good of him to come.”

“It was. It took, oh, four letters? To convince him. And he still won’t agree to be the one to walk me.”

“Why not?” Jaime asks. Sansa rolls her eyes and affects an impression that they both do quite often when reading the contents of Jon’s mournful letters.

“After everything I did, how could you ask me? I’m only your cousin now and I’m an oathbreaker and kinslayer besides.”

“I should have guessed. Who’s going to do it, then?”

He imagines Brienne suddenly, walking arm-in-arm with Sansa, golden armor radiant in the soft light from the torches and candles. He hasn’t nearly had enough time to confront the fact that she will be arriving literally at any moment, and the sudden imagining is enough to make him feel sick with longing.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Sansa asks. She looks between them, her hand already nestled in the crook of his elbow, and Jaime stares at her.

“It _is_ obvious,” he says. “Your plan all along has been to resurrect your father by infuriating his ghost enough to drive him from his crypt.”

Sansa laughs, and she tucks still closer, looking unfairly beseeching. She doesn’t often resort to childish little tricks like wide eyes and a slightly pleading tone, but she’s been childish all day today. Excited about her wedding, happy to see Jon again, excited for Brienne’s arrival. He can’t decide.

“It would make Jon annoyed if I asked an oathbreaker far worse than him to take his place.”

“So you’re appealing to my shittier nature.”

“Jon’s half Stark too, and you don’t mock him nearly as much as you mock me. It’s only fair.”

“Are you only asking me because you have no other options? Because I can think of a few. Two who are arriving today, in fact.”

Sansa makes a quiet noise and pulls him to a stop so that she can face him, gripping him by both arms.

“I am asking you because there is no one I would rather ask,” she says. She says it firmly, finally.

“Except Jon.”

“Well, at the time, fine. But he’s turned me down for absurd reasons, so now you’re at the top because at least you aren’t ridiculous about your guilt.” She sighs and looks up at the weirwood. “I had a dream about it, once. During preparations for the war. I was so tired, and Bran asked for my company, so I sat down to wait. I fell asleep out here while waiting for Bran to come back to himself, and then I had it. I never saw my husband’s face, only yours. You were leading me through the godswood, and I thought it was just one of those things that dreams do. Why would it be _you_? But now you’re my Hand, and you’re my friend, and it seems like it would be absurd to ask anyone else. And I would be glad if it was you.”

“All right,” Jaime says, helpless in the face of such a sincere request. He remembers another girl looking up at him like that. Another girl saying that she was glad of him. How could he say no?

* * *

He hears the shouts for the gates to be opened as he’s sitting at his desk, scribbling out a request to White Harbor from the stonemason. Trying to work so that he can take his mind off waiting.

He goes to his window when the gates begin to open. It has happened three other times today with three other late-arriving parties, and the later it gets without a showing, the more anxious he gets. Not only does he have to see the woman he loves – the woman who left him – but he has to be a part of this fucking wedding. A Lannister giving a Stark away to a Greyjoy husband. Surely the north will rise in revolt, and even if it doesn’t, Brienne will be there, _watching. _Those ridiculous, beautiful eyes on him. What has happened to him? He used to be so good at not caring about anything. Now he suddenly cares too much.

The gates creak slowly, and then there she is. Brienne. Her hair is longer than he’s ever seen it, and she has pulled it back into a knot from which some hair has escaped, framing her face. She’s already biting her bottom lip, eyes scanning the courtyard, and he smiles a bit, because she’s nervous to see him too.

Except then he sees the armor. And he sees the cloak. And his smile fades into a withering sigh, because nothing has changed. She’s here, and he can look upon her again, but she’s here because it’s her duty, and duty will take her away again. He will need to make the best of this time. He will need to protect himself, too, as much as he can.

Tyrion rides in beside her, looking more tired and older than Jaime remembers him looking. At least he knows his little brother will be glad to see him in a very uncomplicated way. Tyrion might even be proud of him. His letters are teasing and slightly sarcastic, but Jaime knows that when he _sees_ how much Jaime has been doing, he’s going to be impressed.

Despite himself, maybe. But still impressed.

Theon steps forward to greet the party from Kings Landing, welcoming them to Winterfell. Jaime had offered to do it in Sansa’s stead, but Sansa apparently hadn’t trusted him to do it with the solemnity that she wanted it done, so she foisted it on her husband-to-be, instead. Theon looks proud and only slightly dour in his fine black and gold doublet, and Tyrion shakes his hand eagerly while Brienne continues to look around.

Jaime sits back at his desk, knowing that they’ll send Tyrion and Brienne up to see him. Knowing that he can’t take the thought of Brienne catching him watching from his window. He won’t go down for a few reasons, but primarily he just…isn’t ready. He might be a coward, but seeing her from a distance was bad enough. When he sees her up close, he will be in danger of forgetting that she left him and chose duty over him. He will forget the bitterness of the past year, and the longing that came with it. He will forget that she will soon leave once again. He will forget that she swore herself into Bran’s service for life, and that there is no room in that life for him anymore.

He cannot forget those things. He cannot afford to. He has spent so much of his life feeling unsatisfied, restless, constantly convinced he’s making the wrong choices. Serving as Hand to the Queen in the North is the most worthy service he’s had, and he can’t let himself waver. Jaime is not a man used to giving up on love for the sake of anything else, but he loves what he is doing, and he loves his chosen queen, and it is enough. Even without Brienne, it is enough. He can’t let himself forget that.

Here, in his office, he feels safest. He wonders if Brienne’s armor and cloak make _her _feel safe. Remind her of her vows as much as Oathkeeper at her hip hopefully reminds her of his love. The cloak and armor never did much to keep him from straying, but Brienne is better than him. _He _must be better than him, now.

He let her leave. He didn’t try to stop her because he knew it wasn’t his place. Seeing her now after nearly dying of a fucking winter chill, after living apart from her for a year, it _feels_ different, but it can’t be. The best he can hope for is that she will slip into his bed and give him a few more nights to remember, but he can’t do that to her. It never made him feel very terrible to break his own vows, but Brienne is different.

At his desk, in his office, with Tyrion present, he will be better able to remember that, as much as he loves her, he was still right to let her go because she _wanted_ to leave.


	10. I can't promise you that I won't let you down

Brienne imagined it. Of course she imagined it. Riding through the gates of Winterfell and seeing Sansa and Jaime standing there, looking exactly as they did the day she watched them ride out of Kings Landing.

He had looked back at her. Memorizing her. Waving with his golden hand. Eyes glimmering wetly.

But when she and Tyrion arrive in Winterfell, Jaime isn’t there. He isn’t waiting to greet them.

It would be different if she didn’t know from Tyrion and Bran that Jaime still loves her. Or if she didn’t know _him_. She would think that his absence now in the courtyard was indifference or just a dedication to his duties. But Jaime isn’t here to greet her or Tyrion, and that means he is still bruised by her leaving.

The past few moons have been increasingly intolerable between her lack of interest in her position and the dual attack from both Bran and Tyrion, who insist on reminding her that she chose this path. That she thought she _had_ to choose it and chose for the honor of a good position and the duty she felt, rather than choosing something that made her happy. This insult from Jaime, this pointed absence, only adds to it. Piling on. _I chose wrong. Gods help me, I chose wrong._

“It seems my brother was needed elsewhere,” Tyrion remarks to Theon, who has been every bit the gentlemen in greeting them.

“He’s probably with Sansa,” Theon says, amused by Tyrion’s attempts at digging. “There have been a lot of last minute preparations.”

“And my brother is assisting her?” Tyrion asks. “That should be good. Can you take us to them?”

Theon nods without hesitation, but Brienne hangs back. Tyrion’s look in her direction is sharp and leaves no room for argument, which makes Brienne’s shoulders tense.

“I should make sure our men are settled,” she says.

“That’s what Podrick is for. _You_ are here to see Sansa and my brother. Come on.”

Brienne follows, but only because _not_ following would make her seem as childish and terrified as she is.

* * *

Theon takes them to Sansa’s quarters, and he leaves them in the hall to see if Sansa is ready to receive them. When he returns, he’s grinning, and he shakes his head.

“She’s dressing for the wedding,” he says. There is something youthful and mischievous in his expression that makes Brienne blush, though he also just sounds...happy. Soft and pliant and happy. It doesn’t seem like a weakness on him. “Your brother must be in his office. I can take you there.”

Brienne looks longingly at the door behind which Sansa is waiting. She had pushed Tyrion and the other men hard, hoping to reach Winterfell early enough that she could secure a few moments to ask Sansa about the year in which Brienne has been apart from Jaime. Not that she’s even sure what she would feel comfortable asking. Everyone knows how she and Jaime felt about each other, but to address it so baldly with the queen…she’s not sure she could have done it. Still, it was nice to think she had the option.

She knows she’s dragging her feet as they head to Jaime’s office. Tyrion is moving more quickly. His feelings for Jaime are apparently the eager, uncomplicated sort that she wishes hers were.

Theon knocks twice before pushing open the door with a familiarity that is enviable. He leans against the doorway, looking amused and casual and so effortlessly at home. Brienne remembers the boy they met in the woods. Shaking and terrified and half-crazed. More animal than man in the way he jumped at every sound. She saw him only briefly before the Long Night, enough to know that he had recovered almost as much as Sansa had, but even then he didn’t look nearly as well as he does now. There’s a careful kind of confidence in him. Brienne recognizes it well. It was the way she felt after she and Jaime spent that first night together. Wanted. Appreciated. Loved. A recipient of a gift she hadn’t thought she would ever get.

“You ready for visitors?” Theon asks, and Brienne has to clutch Oathkeeper at the answering drawl.

“Oh, but these reports from White Harbor are so vital,” Jaime teases. His voice is low and amused and devoid of any of the tension she feels. “Of course. Send them in.”

He’s standing when Theon moves aside and ushers in Tyrion and Brienne. Behind his desk, looking bright and gleaming in the sunlight from the window. He’s dressed in deep red and burnished gold, plainly already dressed for the wedding. His hair is longer than it was, and still more brown and gray than gold, though some of the gold shines in the afternoon sunlight.

He looks…well. He looks very well. And he looks pleased to see them. He drops to one knee to enfold Tyrion in a warm, brotherly embrace. He kisses Tyrion on the hair before ruffling it, a consummate big brother. Then he straightens, and he meets Brienne’s eyes, and she sees the guardedness of the expression. A wall between them. It hides his heart. She thinks of Sansa's letter, and the things she claims he said. She believes the letter, but she believes the hesitation, too.

_I hurt him_, she remembers.

_I made the wrong choice_, she thinks.

“Ser Brienne,” Jaime says, all politeness, a marked contrast from his warm greetings to Tyrion. Brienne controls her own expression. She cannot and she will not show her disappointment. It isn’t _fair_. She has earned his wariness.

“Ser Jaime,” she says.

“_Lord Commander_ Brienne,” Tyrion corrects, obnoxiously. “Unless you’ve forgotten your courtesies in the unforgiving north. You’re practically one of them now. Though your beard has been tamed for the festivities, I see.”

Jaime smiles wryly back in Tyrion’s direction, looking exhausted. Looking like a man who wants nothing more than to close his office door on the world.

“I haven’t forgotten anything. I apologize, Lord Commander.”

“Please don’t,” Brienne says, managing to sound irritated and not agonized, and Tyrion laughs.

“She is stunningly easy to rile,” he says. “Though I suppose you’d know that better than anyone.”

“I suppose I did,” Jaime answers. He looks warning now, and he moves to sit back down in his chair. He’s wearing his gold hand, and it thunks loudly against his desk, as if he isn’t used to the weight of it anymore. “How was the journey?”

“We haven’t seen you in more than a year, and you want to talk about the journey? It was unbearable, as it always is.”

“That’s good to hear,” Jaime says, placidly polite, still looking suspiciously at Tyrion.

“We shouldn’t bother you any longer,” Brienne tries, sending desperate glances at the back of Tyrion’s head. She’s still lingering in the doorway. Jaime’s brother, meanwhile, is halfway into a seat at the desk. Jaime looks bemused, slightly put-out by this invasion into his space, and Tyrion looks gleeful.

“Nonsense,” Tyrion says. “Jaime, call for some wine. We have so _much_ to talk about.”

Jaime frowns at Tyrion. His sly tone. The way he leers in Brienne’s direction. Brienne feels her face heating.

“I’ll leave you to it,” she says. “I have to see to my men. Ser Jaime.” She bows slightly, ignoring Tyrion’s open irritation. Jaime scrambles to his feet so he can bow in return, and it’s a slip. A crack in his armor. She needs to see more, but she knows she can’t. Not in front of Tyrion, at least. “I hope we can talk more later,” she says, and a small smile makes its way across her former lover’s face.

Brienne doesn’t wait for anything else. She brushes past Theon, still standing in the door, and she makes her escape.

There’s a side exit from the great hall that leads right out into the yard, near where Jon and Tormund are currently watching the Winterfell men train. Brienne doesn’t particularly want to talk to them, but she’s glad to stand in the snow and breathe fresh air. 

She isn’t sure why she’s surprised that Tyrion seemed immediately poised to make her miserable. She hates to be teased, because even when it’s done by someone like Tyrion, who knows all too well what it’s like to be mocked, it still makes her feel too big or too small or some wrong size. Some wrong shape. She is Lord Commander of the Kingsguard of Westeros. Surely she should stop feeling prickled by jests about her. Or maybe that’s just something she’s never going to be able to train herself out of.

She supposes that there is some part of Tyrion that blames her for hurting his brother, and she understands that. She thinks also that there is probably a part of him that resents his own position as deeply as she has come to resent hers. Maybe seeing Jaime look so at ease in his office had made Tyrion jealous in that prickly way that both Lannister men can get, where they strike out at the nearest target when they’re wounded. It certainly made Brienne feel odd and disjointed to see Jaime looking so pleased with himself. He looked younger, almost, the lines of his face softened somewhat now that he’s not constantly on edge. Peacetime has restored him to himself. It has only made Brienne feel more stretched out and wrong than ever.

Jon finally spots her, and he inclines his head. Tormund doesn’t leer at her nearly as badly as he used to, so Brienne feels safe in going over to chat with them about whatever they’ve spent the past year doing beyond the wall. She can do that. Stop thinking about Jaime for a few moments until she can figure out what she’s going to say to him when they finally have the chance to speak alone.


	11. and in the cold light I live to love and adore you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just a reminder that I am eternally beating myself up for not splitting these chapters in better places. I thought each perspective was long enough for its own chapter but THEY ARE NOT AT ALL LONG ENOUGH. One more coming up next, and then the epilogue hopefully later!

“As charming as ever,” Jaime says, sitting back down at his desk, watching Brienne flee into the hallway past an eternally amused Theon. _Later. We’ll talk later. _His palms are getting a bit sweaty just at the thought.

“I’m not sure which one of us that’s directed to.”

“You, obviously. Are you determined to make this horrible for both of us? I was doing so well.”

“Yes, your blank face was, I’m sure, a massive comfort. She was already nervous about seeing you again. I wanted you to do something dramatic like present her with flowers or get down on your knees and beg her to take you back.”

“You really do thrive on discomfort, don’t you?”

“As long as it belongs to other people, absolutely. And yours is especially thrilling. Brienne is miserable.”

Jaime would love to argue, because it might give his brother something else to talk about aside from Jaime’s obviously wounded heart, but he can’t. He saw the way Brienne held herself, and the way she looked at him, and he knows that she regrets her choice.

“I expected you to wait at least a few hours before ambushing us. You didn’t even let Brienne take a moment to breathe.”

“Brienne has had plenty of moments to breathe, believe me. She’s done nothing _but_ breathe. The Kingsguard isn’t the place for her. She is wasted on it. “

“You know, instead of declaring the fault with the Kingsguard, you _could_ acknowledge that you’re not making it easy for her. Everyone knows you control Bronn.”

“I certainly do _not_ control Bronn. Not anymore. He’s an ass entirely on his own. And I _have_ tried. After she made it clear that her choice was to leave you, and after _you_ made it clear that I was not to treat her like the woman who broke my brother’s heart but like the woman who made a very good and noble choice to serve the realm, I did my best to make sure that she was included. But even those of us with concrete roles on the small council find ourselves with too much time on our hands. Bronn spends it drinking and whoring. I spend it reading and making sure King Bran doesn’t piss off too many diplomats with his oblivious insights. Davos is actually getting to spend time with his precious family, which must be nice. And Brienne, well. Brienne trains, and she teaches. I’m sure there are other things she fills her time with, but I’m not sure what they are, and I doubt they’re very fulfilling. Even Bran thinks it’s beneath her.”

“Then why did he ask her?” Jaime wonders.

“I believe he asked her because he thought it would make Sansa feel better to have her with him. He was even probably right about that. Though I doubt my former wife feels the same way she used to. They were so close, she and Brienne. She probably wishes Brienne was back here, too.”

“She does,” Jaime says. He glances out at the courtyard and sees Brienne talking with Jon and that giant Tormund fellow. He turns his back, gritting his teeth. It’s not his place to get jealous anymore. And besides, he should know better. She chose him the night of the Winterfell feast, and he knows she would choose him again if there was any choice at all. “But Brienne made her decision.”

“Funny, that’s the same thing she said to me. I’ll tell you what I told her: choices lead to other choices. It isn’t one choice and then nothing else for the rest of your life. That would be an absurd way to live, can you imagine? If people actually followed through on the consequences of their choices? Luckily for all of us, there are ways out.”

“The Kingsguard swears for life.”

“I’m so sorry, my lord, I didn’t realize. I thought you were my brother Jaime. I appear to have been mistaken. If Kingsguard swear for life, he must be back in the Red Keep somewhere.”

“I can’t believe I used to think you were clever,” Jaime says, deadpan. Tyrion smirks.

“You take my point, though.”

“Do you really think Brienne will ever dishonor herself enough that Bran will release her from her vows?” Jaime asks. “Because she won’t. She will endure the consequences of her choices, because _she_, Tyrion, is the kind of person for whom choices have consequences. It doesn’t matter what she wants. It doesn’t matter what I want. It matters what she swore to do, what oaths she took. Her honor means more to her than anything.” 

“Tell her that you still love her.”

“To what end?” Jaime asks, sighing loudly, with disgust. He wishes that Tyrion would just…fuck off for once.

“Because she needs to hear it. From _you_, not from some letter mocking your fevered ramblings.”

“Well, how wonderful for her. We all need things. Some of us choose correctly. Some of us choose wrong and live with our regret thereafter. Some of us choose correctly and get fucked anyway.”

“So you _are_ bitter about all this.”

Jaime sighs, and he wishes that he had a more honorable answer for his brother.

“I’m bitter, I suppose. To be left behind. I accepted it from Cersei for some forty odd years. Always wanting more than she gave me but never getting it. She was good at that. Metering out affection. When she wanted me, she wanted me regardless, because she knew I always did. I was always the one left wanting more. It wasn’t like that with Brienne. She gave herself fully. Every bit of her. I thought it was different. I thought I finally understood what love was supposed to be. Not the possessive madness I felt for Cersei, but something that.…I don’t know. Steadied. I don’t know how else to say it. But then she left, too. It was the same, in the end.”

“You can’t possibly mean that. Brienne is nothing like Cersei.”

“Of course she isn’t! It’s not _her_ fault the only other woman I’ve loved also wanted something larger than me. It’s just…not easy. Having it happen twice. But I can be bitter quietly. It’s not ruinous. I still love her. I still wish...well, I don’t know what I wish. It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Or trying to get you to see, if you’d like. She needs to understand that you love her. That you would take her back.”

“Yes, I’m sure that she’s just _dying_ to have a crippled old man begging her for another chance. Or perhaps she’d love the opportunity to break an oath. You know how little she cares for those.”

“Enough of this absurd self pity. Do you trust me?”

Jaime stares at Tyrion, who looks...well, sincere. He looks sincere. That itself is surprising enough that Jaime has to take a few moments to react before answering.

“You know I do,” he says.

“Speak with Brienne tonight. I don’t care when, but she needs to know that there is a way back. She’s so convinced that her choices are irreversible that she blinds herself to alternatives. And don’t tell me you’re afraid.”

“What would I possibly have to fear? Having my heart crushed again?” Jaime asks snidely.

“Well, don’t use it as an excuse, anyway. Now. I really should speak with Sansa before the wedding.”

“What about? And don’t try to protest the annulment now. It really isn’t as adorable as you think it is, to constantly remind her you were once forced to marry.”

“So little faith. I only meant to offer to walk her tonight. I know she has a dearth of other options, and I thought…” Jaime merely smiles at him, smugness growing as Tyrion frowns. “Surely not.”

“She was married to you _years_ ago, and neither of you were happy about the match. Did you really think she wouldn’t have already asked me?”

“You’re...you,” Tyrion says lamely. “A Lannister.”

“As are you, little brother.”

“Yes, but I’m different.”

“Not _so_ different. And I’ve spent the past year with her. More time than _you _ever spent, and neither of us are prisoners, so that really fosters friendship, you know. She asked me this morning if I would perform the duty, and I accepted.”

“Things really have changed for you, haven’t you?” Tyrion asks. “When we were both last here, your only purpose seemed to be giving your lady knight ample reason to never leave your rooms.”

“You should be pleased that I’ve found a purpose.”

“Oh, I am pleased. I’m also very annoyed. And jealous. You’re supposed to be the one always unhappy with his lot, and I’m supposed to be the one clever enough to make the right choices and feel very superior about it.”

Jaime grins at his brother. The ache of seeing Brienne again aside, he really does feel content.

“If you want any advice, I could probably take some time to give it to you,” he says magnanimously.

“I’ll need at least three glasses of wine before you start,” Tyrion replies.


	12. but you and I now, we can be all right

There is some safety, Brienne knows, in the Kingsguard. There is safety in the position – serving for life means that she will never be reduced to being a hedge knight or, worse, married to someone she hates. There is safety in the vows – she can safely ignore the teasing about her looks and her awkwardness because it doesn’t _matter_ anymore whether men want her. Mostly, there is safety in the uniform.

When she was younger, Brienne used to long for a beautiful gown. When visitors came to Tarth, she would receive them wearing whatever latest fashion her father purchased for her. Well-meaning but ultimately clueless, because he never understood how horrible it was for her. It was _Brienne_ who had to endure the irritation and despair of her septa and her handmaidens, who would have to force her mannish form into a gown built for a more delicate woman.

She thinks of Tyrion’s story about wanting to be a knight. She thinks about how _badly_ she wanted a beautiful gown that would fit her perfectly and somehow hide her flaws. As a girl, it didn’t seem to be too much to ask. Surely the right dressmaker could just…alter the form of her gowns a little bit. Make her dresses fit. But no one bothered, because even a beautiful gown could not make an ugly girl less ugly, and so Brienne told herself that gowns were stupid and dresses were useless, and she told herself and anyone who would listen that she would only wear man’s clothing.

She looks at herself in the mirror that she has been provided in her quarters. It’s small and warped and a bit dirty, but it wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t. She knows exactly what she looks like in the Kingsguard armor. There is no need to try on beautiful gowns and despair because they will suddenly cease to be beautiful when she’s wearing them. There is only her armor, and there is her cloak, and there is safety in wearing them just as there is safety in knowing that she doesn’t have to worry about what she looks like.

Still. Just for a little while. She remembers what it was like to want something like that. She wonders what it would look like. She imagines it deep blue with silver lace. Simple enough, for the most part, but with a few little designs in silver thread. She would have a sword belt fashioned to go with it. It wouldn’t be a very _sturdy_ sword belt. It would be delicate and pretty like the dress. But it would serve, and she would wear Oathkeeper proudly.

She gives herself another moment to imagine it, and then she leaves her room behind.

* * *

The godswood has been transformed since the last time Brienne was here. She wonders at Sansa, knowing how horrible her last marriage was. She’d thought Sansa would want to hold this next one elsewhere. Then again, it shouldn’t be such a surprise. Sansa has reserves of strength hidden that Brienne has never understood.

She joins Tyrion to wait for Sansa to make her entrance. Guests filter in slowly. Most of the women wear beautiful dresses beneath heavy fur cloaks, somewhat spoiling the effect, but still Brienne examines them. _Tyrion was right._ It’s easier when you can convince yourself that you don’t want something. She thinks of her own gawky frame, too tall and too wide for any of the dresses her septa tried to make fit her right. She thinks of how beautiful Sansa will probably look when she makes her entrance. 

Theon stands beneath the heart tree, looking nervous and endearing and a bit more like the boy Brienne remembers from the woods. His hands shake. Brienne wonders at Sansa’s choice of groom, too, maybe even more than her choice of location. It isn’t that she doesn’t understand love, and choosing love over duty. She very nearly did. But she knows that Sansa is one of the most dutiful people she’s ever met, and yet she has chosen to marry a man who cannot give her heirs. What could have made her make that choice? When faced with love or duty, Brienne chose duty, as she felt she ought. And if anyone had asked her, she would have bet any amount of gold that Sansa would have done the same. And yet she hadn’t. Was it just that Sansa’s love for Theon was stronger than her own for Jaime? Was it just that Sansa had tired of living a life abandoned and abused and betrayed and wanted to cling to the one person who wanted to stay? It aches, a bit. _Tyrion was right_. It’s easier to pretend you don’t want.

Brienne looks for Jaime, but she doesn’t see him among the guests. She doesn’t want Tyrion to notice or remark on her curiosity, so she stands still and quiet and waits for the ceremony to begin.

Her breath catches when she sees it.

Sansa is wearing a gown of silver. That’s the simplest way to say it. But the embroidery on it is red and black and gold and gray. The red leaves of the heart tree. The red eyes of Jon’s Ghost. The long gray blade of a needle-thin sword. The black curved beak of a raven. Her family, delicate details on the skirt of her gown, to speak for the ones who couldn’t be here. Arya, adventuring wherever she is. Bran sitting on the Iron Throne, although Brienne knows that the raven she spies circling above the godswood will have Bran’s eyes within him. And Jon, standing among the guests with Ghost, already teary-eyed, still not quite returned in spirit. Sansa spent her childhood trying to get back to her family, only to have them all drift away once victory was finally in sight. She has reclaimed them in her gown, and she is reclaiming them with her choice: marrying Theon. Making a family of her own. Choosing love because everyone else has forced her for years to choose the opposite.

And Jaime.

Jaime has Sansa’s arm in his, and he looks proud and smug and _infuriating_ as he walks her through the powdery snow towards where Theon is waiting, the Greyjoy boy’s eyes big and wet and incredulous at the sight of his bride. Jaime’s hair has been carefully brushed out, and his beard looks even neater than it was when Brienne saw him earlier. He looks more whole, more solid, than he ever has. Years of being the person he was _meant_ to be. Years of choosing the needs of his family over wants of his own. He has chosen this, Brienne realizes. He may have chosen it at first because he didn’t know what else to do, but he has chosen it every day since because he loves it, because it makes him feel whole.

Brienne watches the ceremony with a buzzing feeling of discontentment within her that wars with her happiness to see Sansa here, powerful and happy and so _loved_. She tries very valiantly not to cry, but she isn’t at all successful. When Theon kisses Sansa sweetly on the lips, and Sansa smiles into his mouth like it’s everything she’s ever wanted, Brienne remembers another kiss. Less romantic, maybe. Drunk and needy and desperate. But it was everything all the same.

* * *

Afterwards, Sansa runs to Brienne and throws her arms around her. It’s more effusive and joyful than Sansa has ever been in her presence, and it sets Brienne’s eyes watering again. Theon isn’t far from his wife’s side, tucking his arm around her waist once she pulls back from Brienne, and Brienne can’t stop seeing them huddled and terrified in the snow after the attack by the Bolton men.

“You look beautiful, your grace,” Brienne manages to say, and Sansa smiles and waves off the words.

“Brienne, please. _Sansa_. I will never be ‘your grace’ to you.”

Brienne nods, not trusting herself to speak.

“You never told _me_ not to call you ‘your grace’,” says Jaime, amused, coming up to stand beside Sansa. She laughs at him. Still so sparkling.

“That’s because _you_ need to be reminded occasionally who’s in charge,” she teases. Jaime scoffs and lifts the crown off Sansa’s head and places it securely on his own. Brienne is aghast at the insult, but Sansa only laughs as if it’s a joke they’ve made before, and she snatches it back. “It’s my wedding day,” she points out. “You should be nicer to me.”

“I should be, shouldn’t I?” Jaime asks with a sigh. “Ah, well. Why start now? They’ll be waiting for you at the feast,_ your grace_.”

“Much better,” Sansa says, and she squeezes Jaime’s arm before she leads Theon away. Their heads are already bent together, whispering.

The godswood empties slowly, the guests following Sansa and Theon into the great hall, where music is already playing. Even the brisk tunes take on a ghostly quality out here, and Brienne is reminded of the night before the battle, when Podrick sang for them. Jaime is looking at her now like he’d looked at her then. All determination and barely-held-back words. Brienne wasn’t sure she could take it, then. She’s certain she can’t take it now.

“Ser Jaime…” she starts.

“Lord Commander,” he replies, a challenge. An answer of one formal title with another even more formal. Brienne cannot help her flinch.

“We should…” she starts, but he shakes his head.

“Just…a moment. Please.”

Brienne stops speaking, and she worries her bottom lip between her teeth, and she forces herself to nod.

A moment. She at _least_ owes him a moment.

“I know that you have made your choices,” Jaime says. “I won’t lie to you and tell you that I understand them. I understand parts, I suppose. That it must have been an honor, I don’t doubt. And you have always been the most honorable person of my acquaintance.” He smiles a little, and she forces herself to smile back, though she feels her stomach sinking because she’s quite sure she can’t do this. “I know, too, that the Kingsguard swears for life. Well. Allegedly. But you aren’t like me. You won’t give Bran reason to strip you of your title and your rank, no matter what you might want. That isn’t you.”

“Ser Jaime…” Brienne starts, trying to stop him.

“Please. Just. Just listen. I don’t expect anything. Truly, I…I knew it would be difficult to see you again. Worse, probably, because Tyrion insisted on being such a shit about it. If left to our own devices, I have no doubt we would have been very staid and proper and we would have avoided each other as much as possible, but he insisted on speaking to me _extensively_ of you, and now I find myself compelled to say this. It’s very simple, and probably not very romantic, but. I miss you. I love you. I don’t think I’ll ever stop. That isn’t my style, but you know that better than anyone. I know nothing can come of it. This isn’t me trying to make you dishonor your vows. This is just…I just wanted you to know. So if you really are very unhappy, or even if you aren’t, you can think of me sometimes and remember that there is a man in Winterfell who thinks you’re worth more than a thousand of those idiots on the small council. And, if it’s not too much, I would very much like to write to you. There’s nothing in your vows that would forbid exchanging letters with a man who loves you.”

Brienne cannot handle it anymore. It’s that last bit, that quiet, wrecked note of resignation and want and longing in his voice. There has always been this war inside her, trying to understand the extent of Jaime’s feelings for her. Her own were so strong. She couldn’t imagine his ever measuring up. But that hopeful suggestion. Just…writing. Still so far from each other, fated to never kiss or touch or fuck each other ever again, but he just wants to write to her. He just wants her in his life.

Easier to convince herself that she doesn’t want the thing she can’t have, but she _can _have it. It’s standing in front of her, _telling_ her that she can have it. Why should she walk away from it just because she has convinced herself that it’s the right thing to do? Bran told her plainly: he doesn’t need her. Tyrion said it too. Bronn and Davos have been telling her daily, just by virtue of never needing her or listening to her suggestions. She chose duty over love because that was the choice she was _supposed_ to make. She chose honor over romance because that was what a knight _would_ choose. She chose service to King Bran over a life with Jaime because when she was a little girl, sobbing and staring at her ugly face in the mirror, she convinced herself that knighthood and service to a good lord were the only things she wanted, because they were the only things she was made for.

But now Jaime Lannister, the most handsome man in Westeros, is standing in front of her, quietly pleading with her to just _write_ to him, if that’s all she can afford to give him.

She looks away from Jaime’s earnest, wanting expression. She looks at the weirwood tree, and she finds the raven. It cocks its head to one side: acknowledgement.

“You were right,” she tells it. “I’ve made my choice.”

The bird caws loudly, startling Jaime, who looks at it as it takes off and flaps off into the sky.

“Was that the king?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says.

“What was he…?”

“Waiting for me to choose to be released from my vows,” Brienne says, and Jaime has only a moment to develop this gleeful, hopeful expression before Brienne wraps her fist in the collar of his expensive crimson jacket and pulls him in for a bruising kiss.


	13. and let it shine on, let it shine on us

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whew! Okay! Here's the epilogue! Thank you for bearing with me today with my endless posting, and I hope you enjoy it!

Sometimes, Jaime forgets about that year. Even as soon as three moons after Brienne comes back to Winterfell, he’s likely to forget that there was ever a separation. Brienne slips back into life in the north as deftly as if she had never left, and Jaime’s bed is warm at night, and Brienne always remembers to stoke the fire, so the rest of his chamber is warm, too.

He looks over at her as she sleeps, sometimes, and he remembers. Remembers lonely nights and days spent trying so hard to force himself not to think about it that he ended up thinking about it twice as hard. But then she’ll rouse and see him watching her, and she’ll roll over on top of him and kiss him until he forgets again.

And sometimes he has to stop and take a moment to breathe and remember the way hope had flared to life in his chest, bursting through the cage he had done his best to contain it within. That moment when she told him that she was going to give up her vows. When she discarded the oath that he had been so sure she would die fulfilling, regretting it to her last breath. When she grabbed him and kissed him and _chose him_.

Chose to stay.

* * *

Alys gracefully gives up the role of Commander of Sansa’s Queensguard, having satisfied her thirst for “adventure” by standing around outside the queen’s rooms being bored for a year. She decides that it’s time to return to her lands and start rebuilding. Sansa’s Queensguard never was beholden to the old vows, and so Brienne slots into place at Sansa’s side as if she had never left, without any of the hesitation that she felt upon swearing to Bran.

If there’s anything that tries the peace in those first few weeks, it’s the fact that Brienne and Theon butt heads, both of them too eager to protect Sansa from the so-far zero threats that have been made against her. Jaime and Sansa take to scheduling their meetings in the fucking crypts to hide from them, huddled around a candle and attending to matters of the north before bitching relentlessly about their significant others, unable to keep smiles off their faces for long.

When there is an _actual _threat – a few northmen who decide to rise up during a gathering because they can’t take the insult of a Greyjoy king, even if he’s named Stark now and is really more of a consort – Brienne kills four of them, Jaime takes out a respectable two, and Theon kills three who are going for Sansa and then a fourth who had just tackled Jaime to the ground and was aiming to smash his head into paste with his mailed fist.

Brienne and Theon get along quite a bit better after that.

With that weak attempt at an uprising put so solidly down, to say nothing of the feeling of power that must come with having Brienne once again at her back, Sansa begins to feel safe venturing outside Winterfell again. She and Theon and Jaime tour the various holdfasts of the north, making their way through the new Free Folk settlements until they finally arrive at the still-rather-ruined Wall, where Jon meets them for a pleasant reunion. Even _he_ seems more whole than he was at Sansa’s wedding, and he kisses his cousin’s forehead and hugs her tight, whispering something that makes Sansa look equal parts relieved and emotional.

“You’re welcome home any time,” she says, and Jon doesn’t say anything maudlin or annoying about not deserving it. He only nods, and he swallows back tears, and Jaime knows that he’ll visit.

It’s on this tour north that Sansa meets Lyanna. A dark haired little girl with the Stark coloring and the Stark look. A Karstark by blood, distantly related somehow. The lady of the holdfast they’re visiting was a Stark descendant, but she’s dead now, along with her husband. Lyanna is barely two years old, and she’s already alone in the world. It’s almost _too_ perfect.

Sansa agrees to take Lyanna with her to Winterfell, to name her a Stark and name her the heir to the northern throne. Jaime’s quite smug because he’s the one who told her things would work out and that she should marry Theon, and he mentions it daily, ignoring the eyerolls from Brienne and Sansa both.

He and Brienne are married by the end of the year. Brienne’s father is a bit terrifying, but only accidentally, as he is extremely tall and also knows that Jaime and Brienne have been sharing a room at Winterfell unwed. Jaime spends the first few days of his visit on constant edge until he realizes that Selwyn Tarth is just relieved that someone else finally sees his daughter as the prize she is.

Tyrion is irritated to have to travel to Winterfell _again_, and he’s even more irritated when Podrick declares that he, too, has been released from the Kingsguard and will be serving the Queen in the North hereafter.

* * *

“This is all your fault,” Tyrion gripes to Jaime after the wedding, standing in the courtyard together. Jaime’s pleased and smug under his new cloak with the new sigil that he and Brienne designed together: the blue background with the ivory trim, with the golden lion's head with a red mane that looks like a sunburst.

“How’s it my fault?” Jaime wants to know.

“You were supposed to stay in Kings Landing where I could use your aimless sadness to convince you to be Master of Coin, and then you could have pined annoyingly for Lord Commander Brienne and kept me company. Instead you chose to come _here_, the place where the Starks live, and you’ve had the gall to _thrive_, so I can’t even feel superior because my plan would have been better.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but I’ve never been happier,” Jaime says.

“I know. It’s adorable. And infuriating. I hardly know how to talk to you anymore. _Look_ at you in that absurd cloak. Jaime Lannister _of Tarth_. Father’s shitting himself somewhere. Cersei's _screaming_.”

“Let them. I like it.”

Jaime’s simple happiness makes Tyrion laugh, but he grows slightly more sober.

“It was half a joke when you said it. I don’t know if you remember. It was the first time we were here, and you found me in a whorehouse.”

“You might have to narrow it down.”

“You sounded so pathetic when you said it. _Don’t leave me alone with these people._ It was funny, because these Starks with their cold northern ways were so alien to us Lannisters and our many, many perfections. I’ve been thinking of that often. How you’ve changed. How happy you are to be left alone here with them.”

“It’s _home_, now,” Jaime admits, sounding wondering and confused even to his own ears. “Not just of circumstance, but because I _feel _it is home. I never would have imagined it. My children will be raised here. They will grow up here alongside Lyanna and whatever other children Sansa and Theon adopt.”

“Has that been discussed, then?” Tyrion asks. Quietly hopeful. More excuses to complain about coming down to Winterfell to visit, possibly, but Tyrion always _did _like the children. Even Joffrey at first.

“It’s been discussed,” Jaime says, because Brienne told him it’s too early to tell anyone yet about what the maester said (not to mention the cryptic message that arrived from Bran three days before she met with the maester, which was a note that just said ‘congratulations’).

“I’m happy for you,” Tyrion says. It’s not the first time he’s said it, but it _is_ the first time that it feels completely earned.

“I’m happy for myself,” Jaime says, and his smile widens, because Tyrion rolls his eyes and mutters about his big brother being a sap. It’s _true_, of course. Everyone who has ever seen him with Brienne or Sansa or little Lyanna Stark would know it’s true. It’s not a secret anymore. Nothing shameful or hidden because Tywin Lannister didn’t raise his boys to be ruled by their emotions when pragmatism and legacy and family honor were just so much more important.

It’s just something else that people know about him now_. _Jaime Lannister, the Kingslayer, Hand to the Queen of the North, secret sap, husband to the most stubbornly honorable knight in the known world.

He stands in the Winterfell courtyard beside his brother. He remembers a different night, and a woman’s tears. Begging him to stay. There had been no choice before Brienne. He _had_ to ride back to Kings Landing and die with his sister, because he _needed_ to try and protect her, even if he knew he would likely die in the attempt. But, _stay_, Brienne had said. An offer. A plea. A choice made in a moment of what he thought was weakness. Staying and surviving when everything in him said that he _should _die.

More than forty years of thinking that he was meant for only one thing. One person. A reflection of a woman who changed and grew outside him long before he realized the extent of it. The fact that someone else was able to break past that shell and make him love her even half as much as he did would be astonishing enough. But she looked him in the eyes, and she begged him to stay, and she overrode a _lifetime _of grooming that told him to care only for his family.

There are no women like Brienne. There is only Brienne. And Jaime is very much looking forward to being surprised and confounded and overwhelmed by her for as long as she’ll have him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just a reminder if you haven't found me on tumblr : I'm at angel-deux-writes. Send me messages and prompts and whatever else you want, because I don't know shit about tumblr yet, but I'm tryin to learn!

**Author's Note:**

> I know some people were cool with the Kingsguard ending, but I was not. I hate the Kingsguard more than Jaime does. I hate the Nights Watch too, while we're at it. This story came about because a co-worker said to me right after the show ended that he liked Brienne's ending because it "showed she didn't need a man" (at which point i rolled my eyes and went uuuuughghhhhh) and also that "she probably would have chosen it even if Jaime was alive, because it was her dream". To which I was like "what? Where? Since when? What are you talking about? That's the worst take I've ever heard", but of course it stuck with me and bothered me until I explored in fiction exactly HOW MUCH I hated that take. So what you can expect from this is a lot of Brienne trying to rationalize her decisions based on what she thinks she SHOULD want, and Jaime being sad about it because he just wants his girlfriend back.


End file.
